A Study Evaluating Welding Quality in Pressure Vessel Using Mahalanobis Distance

Robotic GMA (Gas Metal Arc) welding process is one of widely acceptable metal joining process. The heat and mass inputs are coupled and transferred by the weld arc to the molten weld pool and by the molten metal that is being transferred to the weld pool. The amount and distribution of the input energy are basically controlled by the obvious and careful choices of welding process parameters in order to accomplish the optimal bead geometry and the desired quality of the weldment. To make effective use of automated and robotic GMA welding, it is imperative to predict online faults for bead geometry and welding quality with respect to welding parameters, applicable to all welding positions and covering a wide range of material thickness. MD (Mahalanobis Distance) technique was employed for investigating and modeling the GMA welding process and significance test techniques were applied for the interpretation of the experimental data. To successfully accomplish this objective, two sets of experiment were performed with different welding parameters; the welded samples from SM 490A steel flats. First, a set of weldments without any faults were generated in a number of repeated sessions in order to be used as references. The experimental results of current and voltage waveforms were used to predict the magnitude of bead geometry and welding quality, and to establish the relationships between weld process parameters and online welding faults. Statistical models developed from experimental results which can be used to quantify the welding quality with respect to process parameters in order to achieve the desired bead geometry based on weld quality criteria.