Experimental and Computer Simulation Results of the Spot Welding Process Using SORPAS Software

The highly competitive nature of the automotive industry drives demand for improvements and increased precision engineering in resistance spot welding. Currently there are about 4300 weld points on the average steel vehicle. Current industrial monitoring systems check the quality of the nugget after processing 15 cars, once every two weeks. The nuggets are examined off line using a destructive process, which takes approximately 10 days to complete causing a long delay in the production process. This paper presents a simulation of the spot welding growth curves, along with a comparison to growth curves performed on an industrial spot welding machine. The correlation of experimental results shows that SORPAS simulations can be used as an off line measurement to reduce factory energy usage. The first section in your paper