Date of Award
2-19-2025
Publication Type
Doctoral Thesis
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Mechanical, Automotive, and Materials Engineering
Keywords
adaptive, automotive, Resistance spot welding, ultrasonic
Supervisor
Roman Maev
Supervisor
Vesselin Stoilov
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) has always been a subject of interest for manufacturing, in particular the automotive industry. In a typical automotive body construction, RSW accounts for an average for 60% of the total welds produced in the manufacturing process. Depending on the size of the vehicle, 5000-7000 resistance spot welds are present in each single car body, totaling up 5 million welds produced per day in a single automotive plant. The construction characteristics of an automotive body make it an ideal candidate for the implementation of the current research. The automotive industry has a particular focus on process acceleration and improvement, mainly through automation and equipment upgrades. Indeed, most of the processes described throughout this dissertation occur in under 500 milliseconds. Several approaches to RSW implementation have been taken throughout the years, with most of them being focused on two different streams: process monitoring, and quality control of the assembled product. From the process standpoint, systems to regulate parameters were designed with the goal of in-process control through approaches, such as dynamic resistance measurements. From the quality monitoring perspective, traditional inspection processes, involved primarily destructive tests, with each OEM having its individual designs and procedures. Since the mid 1980s, such processes started to be replaced by non-destructive methods, with the ultrasonic testing being the main technique applied. Multiple research efforts have focused on the development an “in-line” or an “in-process” spot weld inspection or quality assurance system, however those methods and systems have not been implemented successfully on the industrial floor. With the exponential improvement in electronic hardware, ultrasonic transducer manufacturing technologies, computers, and software, it has become possible to achieve data acquisition and processing speeds unimaginable only a decade ago. As such, it is now possible to develop an embedded ultrasonic method for in-line spot weld monitoring and inspection using modern tools and approaches. This dissertation demonstrates a combined application of these different streams. An advanced ultrasonic system, powered by an artificial intelligence model, is applied to identify key characteristics of the RSW process, and utilize those features to regulate the welding process. This approach improved the adaptive welding system performance while providing a full quality assessment of the process.
Recommended Citation
Stocco, Danilo, "Development of adaptive resistance spot welding methodology based on ultrasonic non-destructive welding growth monitoring" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 9690.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/9690
