Development of All Position Automatic Welding Machine for Fillet Weld of Pipe Flange

Abstract

Recently, at modern pipe shops in shipyards, welding mothods and facilities are so much well developed that various kinds of automatic and/or semi-automatic welding machines are utilized, up to 80∼90 % of all pipe welding. However, automatic welding is mainly applied on straight pipe/flange welding, and welding for complicated curved and long pipes is performed by hand. Authors intended to automize pipe welding in this field and to apply a new idea to make the welding torch turn around the flange to be fitted on the end of pipe. The main works in this paper are as follows. 1) Study of suitable welding condition at all position to fillet welding around pipe frange. 2) Selection of suitable mechanism to enable good welding beads for the above conditions and development of "All position automatic welding machine for fillet weld of pipe flange".