Studies on Joining and Deposition using Planar Movement Setup for GMAW

Abstract

Now-a-days, owing to the rapid advances in technology and immense human intervention, most of the industrial components are not fabricated by conventional manufacturing processes. Industrial automation plays a significant role in order to achieve high accuracy, reliability, precision and quality of industrial processes, but at higher expenses. Automation involved in controlling and operating the various equipment such as CNC machines, robotic welding arms, heat-treating ovens, boilers, stabilization of ships, aircraft, and vehicles mitigates human interventions. In recent years, 3D metal printing technique is tremendously used for building products by vertical layer depositions in various engineering applications. Various welding techniques such as gas metal arc welding (GMAW), laser arc welding, electron beam welding, gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) and plasma arc welding (PAW) are used for additive manufacturing (AM), but GMAW based AM has gained tremendous popularity in the industry. GMAW based AM builds metallic parts by depositing layer over layer to achieve relatively higher deposition rates and denser structures. As fully automation is involved in GMAW based AM, constant contact tubes to work distance provides consistent bead geometry, low spatters, uniform heat input and deep penetration depth as compared to conventional manual welding. To address this challenge, a bi-directional automatic movement setup is indigenously designed and developed to obtain weld with uniform bead width along a desired path and having capability to perform vertical layer depositions for different open and closed profiles utilizing gas metal arc welding. A computer-aided design (CAD) model and a prototype of bi-directional movement setup for planar welding are first made for conceptualization and then, the setup is fabricated. It mainly consists of stepper motors, carriage, transmission system and guide ways. The welding torch is kept perpendicular to the substrate during deposition of all profiles.