ABIBLOG USA: ABICOR BINZEL's Welding Blog

No matter how good your welding process is, weld defects are inevitable. Inspection ensures those defects are caught and fixed before your product goes out the door. Leaving this unaddressed can lead to customer issues, premature product failure, and a lot of other avoidable mistakes. In my experience, I have seen a number of issues impact welding. One of my most memorable experiences was during my time at Tower. We would always run into inconsistency in parts which caused a frenzy in figuring out the reasoning why. We'd argue with our internal and external stamping supplies, have holes and trimmed edges that would move or change, and spend countless hours on the robot cells touching up welds here and there. This lead to many different quality issues and wasted time chasing down and troubleshooting these inconsistencies. 

Are you looking to continue advancing your welding process? You've completed the first step by adding robots to your operation, but now you're looking to improve safety among your team. Step two is setting up a robotic fume extraction system in your plant to improve air quality. The xFUME^® ROBO by ABICOR BINZEL USA and CA is the most effective and economical way to control welding smoke emissions with fume source capture.

There are two physical elements of weld wire to be aware of in a robotic welding application. The first is the cast, which is the natural curvature of the wire. The second is the helix, which is the natural winding geometry of the wire's radial shape. 

ABICOR BINZEL USA is now offering full turn-key solutions to fume extraction welding in both automated, robotic applications and manual applications.

When we look at weld joint detection and the benefits involved, there are two primary features of these technologies: the finding and tracking of the joint.

Micro-arcing in a welding process are small arcs, usually not visible, that happen within the contact tip or wire liner. Instead of making a positive contact all the way through the tip, or at least always on the tip at some point, your wire is making inconsistent contact to the contact tip. This compromises current transfer and causes the wire to micro-arc inside the contact tip.

Porosity is the bane of existence in robotic welding.

It happens. You don’t know where it comes from all the time, or how it’s happening, and you spend days or even weeks troubleshooting to figure it out.

We’ve all been there.

A burnback in welding is when your wire burns back and sticks itself to your contact tip. There are several reasons this can happen. The most primary causes of burnbacks in a robotic application include:

Galvanized has become increasingly popular in the automotive manufacturing space as a corrosion resistant coating on steels. Mainly, it's put on there in a hot dip fashion where you're actually dipping the material in molten zinc and coating it that way. There's electro plating and galvanneal plating also. 

How to mitigate welding fume is a big topic. People, by instinct, oftentimes say, "Oh, I'll put a mask on and that'll be sufficient"

Now, however, there is a systematic approach that's been used by OSHA or any health and safety offices. Now, the approach is to start looking at the process, and starting at the bottom of mitigation pyramid and systematically moving up.

Eliminating or Substituting the Weld Process

The first question to ask is if it is possible to eliminate or substitute the process that's causing the fume? Obviously, most of the time it's not possible to remove welding from the operation. But it's worth considering if you are using stick welding or flux core welding whether you can substitute this process for a better process as far as smoke creation?