how come welding is so tough to automate (how come there’s lots of welders, but factory work was automated)
In: Engineering
There are lots of different things which all work together when welding. You have to be very careful about how much heat you put into the part, too little and you won’t melt the metal together, too much and you’ll burn through or warp the part into the wrong shape, or screw up the metal’s properties.
To control all of that you can play with the arc current, arc gap, travel speed, shield gasses, filler metals, electrodes, and all of those will have a different effect depending on the type of metal or alloy you have.
In short, it’s a very skilled job with a lot that can go wrong, and if you only have one part which is a weird shape like a building strut or an expensive component you want to make sure you get it right. Humans are very good at thinking of lots of variables together at the same time so if the weld starts to go wrong, they can feel how to increase power or back out to keep it on the level. If it’s the same short weld over and over again like a car factory it’s easy to dial in the parameters to automate it.
There’s also some limitations with robots, for example if you have 2 metal surfaces put together in a butt joint they can both be shiny and cameras will have difficulty doing accurate seam tracking without expensive scanning and rendering. So it’ll work if the robot knows exactly where to find the joint, but can be difficult if you show the robot something for the first time. Usually cheaper to hire a person than to invest in all the equipment.
Worth saying this is only the case for ‘traditional’ arc welding like MIG or TIG welding, processes like laser or electron beam welding are usually 100% automated. One of the big problems in the industry now is we are hugely short of engineers who know how to program laser welders properly.
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