Non-Contact Measurement of Nugget Size of Spot Welding Using Focused Air-Coupled Ultrasound

Abstract

Spot welding is widely used in the various fields of engineering and industries. Since the size, shape and mechanical properties of a nugget which is a zone melted and re-solidified during welding are closely related to the strength of the welded structure, quantitative evaluations of them are strongly required. In this work, an air-coupled ultrasound technique with focused transducers has been used for non-contact measurements of spot welds of steel plates. One-dimensional scanning in transmission configuration using a pair of focused air-coupled ultrasonic transducers operating with tone burst waves at 0.3 MHz is performed to obtain the amplitude profile of the transmitted ultrasound through the nugget area of a spot weld. A simple method for determining the nugget size from the profile of the transmitted ultrasound is proposed. To verify the validity of the method, calibration samples which imitate spot welds having different sizes of nuggets are prepared and used for demonstrating nugget size determinations. In addition, the proposed method has been applied to evaluate several spot welds fabricated with different electric currents (5 kA – 9 kA).