Finite element analysis of keyhole plasma arc welding based on an adaptive heat source mode

An adaptive heat source mode is proposed to account for the keyhole effect and the characteristics of volumetric distribution along the direction of the workpiece thickness. Finite element analysis of the temperature field in keyhole plasma arc welding is conducted and the weld geometry is obtained. The predicted results are in agreement with the measured ones.

Keyhole Double-Sided Arc Welding Process

In the proposed method, the current/arc is guided through the keyhole so that the energy of the plasma jet is compensated while it is consumed in heating the workpiece along the keyhole. As a result, deep narrow penetration has been achieved on 12.7 mm (1/2') thick stainless steel plates using 70 A welding current.

Analysis of the 3-D fluid velocity and temperature profile in keyhole plasma arc welding

Modeling and simulation of fluid flow and heat transfer in keyhole plasma arc welding is of great significance for optimizing the process parameters. In this study, a three-dimensional transient model is established to analyze numerically the heat transfer and fluid flow phenomena in keyhole plasma arc welding. VOF （volume of fluid） method is used to track the boundary of the keyhole. The dynamic developments of keyhole geometry, the fluid velocity field and temperature profiles are numerically simulated. And the changing Of the fluid velocity and pressure distribution on the keyhole wall in the forming process of the keyhole are analyzed.

NTWV-based sensing keyhole dimension in plasma arc welding

During stable keyhole plasma arc welding, the pilot arc and the transferred arc exist at the meantime, and the arcs can be considered as a composition of two parts inside and outside the nozzle, respectively. Under the mechanical constriction and thermal contraction effects, the inside arc has certain arc length, electron density and arc profile etc. inducing constant tungsten-to-nozzle voltage. However, the arc outside the nozzle diverges at about 5 degrees and has certain characteristics similar to the free arcs. The nozzle-to-workpiece voltage （NTWV） depends mainly on the length of the arc, which gets bigger as increasing of the weld penetration and keyhole size. The NTWV sensor is developed for monitoring NTWV in real time. The welding experiments are designed to get different penetrations and keyhole sizes. It is found that as the weld penetration and the keyhole size increase, NTWV also increases linearly. The NTWV signals can be used as the feedback variable in automatic control of keyhole plasma arc welding.

Hump formation mechanism in gas-jet-assisted keyhole laser welding of HR-2 stainless steel

Gas-jet-assisted keyhole laser welding offers the possibility of a breakthrough in the limitations of penetration depth in laser welding,which currently suffers from equipment restrictions.A gas jet of sufficient intensity to assist the keyhole should be used to obtain suppressed plasma,a deepened keyhole,and increased penetration depth.However,an excessively strong gas jet gives rise to humps.The incident angle of the keyhole-assisted gas jet is 60°,with a nozzle ahead of the laser beam.A series of experiments were carried out with different welding velocities and gas parameters by using HR-2 hydrogen-resistant stainless steel and a slab CO2 continuous-wave laser welding machine.The weld profiles can be categorized into four types,welds of traditional laser welding,welds of enhanced laser welding,undercut welds,and humping welds with increased gas pressure.A high-speed camera was employed in the experiments to monitor the formation of humps under an excessively strong gas jet.The results of analysis show that hump formation can be divided into six stages.Its main driving force is the intense turbulence of gas jet.There are two main reasons for hump formation：premature solidification of the molten pool caused by the large temperature gradient between the front and rear parts of the molten pool,and the emergence of a thin layer liquid bridge with one-directional flow under the enhanced cooling effect of excessively strong gas.

Detection of keyhole entrance and exit in plasma arc welding

Sensing of keyhole shape and size is important for controlling of plasma arc welding process. In this study, a synchronous vision system is developed by using two CCD cameras to observe the keyhole entrance and exit simultaneously. Experiments are conducted on stainless steel workpiece, Whole keyhole exit image and part of keyhole entrance image are captured synchronously under different welding conditions. Image processing and calibration algorithms are proposed. The boundary and front point of the keyhole entrance and exit are extracted respectively. The effects of welding current and welding speed on ,front point of keyhole entrance and exit are analyzed. Compared to the front point of the keyhole entrance, the position of the front point of the keyhole exit is better to reflect the variation of the welding parameters.

Study on stress and deformation of keyhole gas tungsten arc-welded joints

Keyhole gas tungsten arc welding(K-TIG)of Q345 low alloy steel plates was simulated by using SYSWELD software.The temperature field of the K-TIG welding process was simulated with three different combined heat sources and was compared with the weld profile that was obtained experimentally.The temperature field that was obtained by a combination of a double ellipsoid heat source on the upper half and a three-dimensional Gauss heat source on the lower half was similar to the real situation.The effects of plate thickness,gap and welding speed on the deformation and stress of the K-TIG welded joints were investigated by K-TIG welding numerical simulation.A reduction in the thickness of the weld plates reduced the z-direction deformation and transverse residual stress;an appropriate gap reduced the residual stress and an increase in the welding speed reduced deformation after welding,but did not help to control the residual stress after welding.

Investigation into keyhole-weld pool dynamic behaviors based on HDR vision sensing of real-time K-TIG welding process through a steel/glass sandwich

To obtain a deep insight into keyhole tungsten inert gas welding,it is necessary to observe the dynamic behavior of the weld pool and keyhole.In this study,based on the steel/glass sandwich and high dynamic range camera,a vision system is developed and the keyhole-weld pool profiles are captured during the real-time welding process.Then,to analyze the dynamic behavior of the weld pool and keyhole,an image processing algorithm is proposed to extract the compression depth of the weld pool and the geometric parameters of the keyhole from the captured images.After considering the variations of these parameters over time,it was found that the front and rear lengths of the keyhole were dynamically adjusted internally and had opposite trends according to the real-time welding status while the length of the keyhole was in a quasi-steady state.The proposed vision-based observation method lays a solid foundation for studying the weld forming process and improving keyhole tungsten inert gas welding.

Real-time K-TIG welding penetration prediction on embedded system using a segmentation-LSTM model

Keyhole tungsten inert gas(K-TIG)welding is capable of realizing single-sided welding and double-sided forming and has been widely used in medium and thick plate welding.In order to improve the accuracy of automatic weld identification and weld penetration prediction of robot in the process of large workpiece welding,a two-stage model is proposed in this paper,which can monitor the K-TIG welding penetration state in real time on the embedded system,called segmentation-LSTM model.The proposed system extracts 9 weld pool geometric features with segmentation network,and then extracts the weld gap using a traditional algorithm.Then these 10-dimensional features are input into the LSTM model to predict the penetration state,including under penetration,partial penetration,good penetration and over penetration.The recognition accuracy of the proposed system can reach 95.2%.In this system,to solve the difficulty of labeling data and lack of segmentation accuracy,an improved LabelMe capable of live-wire annotation tool and a novel loss function were proposed,respectively.The latter was also called focal dice loss,which enabled the network to achieve a performance of 0.933 mloU on the testing set.Finally,an improved slimming strategy compresses the network,making the segmentation network achieve real-time on the embedded system(RK3399pro).