Design of a low-cost welding machine controller with a novel control algorithm for an enhanced HF TIG welding process

Abstract

Automation plays an important role in event welding domain. This paper describes the problems associated with arc tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding for automated welding in oil and gas industry for pipe joints. Welding joints inside the offshore pipelines is a complex process and rework or repetitive work is very costly. Weld imperfections are the foremost anxiety in the pipe joint welding. Return out the entire weld machine to find the defect at the time of welding. This is one of the popular industry come with the problem statement to develop the application specific solution for inner pipe welding quality welding. However, this paper gives the solution. Moreover, factors like Joint crack, moisture, corrugated weld object, excessive gas flow, Lack of fusion in the root, Dirty base or filler metal are major problems in the welding process. Due to these issues weld quality is impacted. There are several problem areas in the existing welding control system i.e., poor topology selection, less efficiency, high power loss, more size, high cost, more maintenance, less effective control algorithm for welding control etc Due to all these factors the welding quality is hampered in traditional welding system. Many researchers have worked on the power electronics hardware section improvement but very less work done on the software section. This paper discusses on the software algorithm development and how the weld quality improved. Software welding algorithm development is the novelty of this paper. This paper proposed and developed low-cost welding machine controller using STM32F103 microcontroller with protection scheme. A welding algorithm is proposed and experimented to enhance arc TIG welding quality and automation. Welding algorithm is tested & practically verified using phase-shifted full bridge (PSFB) power converter topology with pulse width modulation (PWM) control technology. The results reveal that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the quality of automated welding.