ABIBLOG USA: ABICOR BINZEL's Welding Blog

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. 

When I used to teach robotic welding misconceptions, I used to try to clear up to people:

Spatter is weld wire.

Many manufacturing engineers are under the impression that spatter is the puddle exploding. That is true to a point, but where the misconception often comes in play is the thinking that the source of spatter is the base metal, which it is not. Really, spatter comes from the filter metal.

When you are evaluating a new robot welding torch, the ramifications of the testing is huge. Normally for large manufacturing companies, this is putting a solutions on the production for years with a high equipment investment. This makes the need to get great data to use to evaluate the right solution critical.

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.

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.

Even if you are already convinced of the advantages of a torch cleaning station, there are still some important things to consider before you buy. With the right choice of torch cleaning station, you can optimize your welding process without welding spatter being an issue.

In automation, processes for joining metals are about plant availability, the reduction of technical and organizational downtime, and fast cycle times. For these points to not to be endangered in your company, the use of a torch cleaning station for automated MIG / MAG welding is indispensable. A torch cleaning station as a system component in the welding cell ensures that the functionality of the welding torch is maintained so that no process errors occur.