Let's face it: for most people looking at Fume Extraction, many of them have never seen fume extractions solutions before aside from extractor arms. 

That means most Safety Managers, Production Managers, or business Owners - and I may be talking to you directly - don't even know what questions to ask themselves before getting started.

The robotic fume extraction landscape has featured few lean, advanced, and cost-effective solutions for manufacturers. While fume extraction for manual welding has experienced a significant spike in new solutions entering the market – from high-vacuum systems to multi-gun units, to countless new fume extraction gun concepts – robotics has remained ignored and mostly unchanged with minimal innovation to speak of.

Fume extraction systems are not all created equally for welding. While the basic premise of a system is the same, and from the outside many look similar, like any product there are a variety of features and specifications that impact fume extraction welding performance in an industrial setting. The factors you will be looking at when sorting through all the choices will be items like:

Fume extraction is becoming a more necessary solution for industrial companies in the wake of continued research findings and government recommendations. Having a good grasp on what fume extraction systems are and how they work is important as you begin to consider fume extraction in your plant.

There are an infinite number of robotic welding cell setups for all different kinds of jobs. In truth, there aren’t many that are exactly alike. And that’s because there are so many different welding automation needs out there for parts and products that need to be welded.

With the new xFUME VAC series we are eliminating harmful welding fumes.

In any manufacturing location across the world, air quality and fume control is an increasing concern. While the welder himself bears the most burden in weld fume exposure and long term health risks, it’s not limited to just the welding operator. Across the entire shop floor – from the forklift operator to administrative staff and walk the floor, exposure to weld fumes is a second hand smoke experience. Even if it’s not always visible or noxious, it’s there. There isn’t a welding operation today that in some way doesn’t need fume extraction.

With fume extraction systems in welding, the filter is usually a non-consideration. After all, it’s the fume extraction system doing all the work, right?

As material selections in automotive manufacturing move further into the high-strength realm, along with the more prevalent usage of difficult-to-weld materials such as aluminum, developing robust processes for joining these materials becomes ever more critical. Adaptation of technologies such as real-time seam tracking, gap bridging, beam oscillation, and integrated clamping to laser-related processes allows for them to be used in a more mainstream approach.

When I read this article from The Atlantic last week on welding salaries and the posits of people proclaiming over the last few years that welders can make $150,000 USD a year, I remembered the countless Instagram and Facebook memes I see claiming similar promises of comfortable lifestyles by getting into one of the more admirable and skilled trades professions out there, and all the welders commenting about that decidedly not being the case.

Welding guns and MIG welding in general come with a lot of talk regarding best practices and how to do certain things right.