Quality estimation system for resistance spot welding of stainless steel

Abstract

Resistance spot welding (RSW), as one of the most widely used processes in sheet metal fabrication, is a complex electromechanical coupled nonlinear process, and weld quality is influenced by various process conditions, noise and errors. Therefore, inconsistent quality from weld to weld is a major problem for RSW process. However, so far there is no satisfactory non-destructive quality estimation method to evaluate the weld quality. The objective of this study is to explore a quality estimation system for RSW. In order to build the quality estimation system, the relationship between various variables during RSW process and weld quality was studied by lots of experiments. Test results showed that the system built in this study could accurately estimate the weld quality and the maximum estimation error was only 5.6%.