OEM software for professional process control
Example of a customer solution for the company 4D Photonics GmbH
Example of a customer solution for the company 4D Photonics GmbH
Process monitoring for quality assurance in laser welding
Laser welding in the automotive industry
Modern welding technology with lasers requires increasingly demanding quality control procedures. Particularly in the automotive industry – for example in the welding of car bodies – high demands are made here. Growing demands are also increasingly arising from the field of electromobility for the production of stators and batteries. In addition, costs must be reduced through control during the production process. For example, the reworking of welded parts can often occur after production has been completed or through discarding. Welding defects such as missing connection, fluctuation of the welding depth or material ejection and system errors of the lasers are monitored.
On behalf of the company 4D Photonics GmbH, S.E.A. has developed the first version of a powerful OEM software for professional process control in laser welding, which meets all the requirements of modern quality assurance. The system, developed in the 90s, has been continuously enhanced with the help of S.E.A. support.
Solution
The WeldWatcher® software created by S.E.A. is based on the TestMaster, a modular operating tool programmed in LabVIEW® for test and production systems in an industrial environment. The software runs on industrial PCs running Windows and is easily adaptable to different laser welding process hardware due to the hardware abstraction typical of the TestMaster. The WeldWatcher® software includes, among other features, the processing and visualization of the process data both in automatic mode and in expert mode for laboratory use.
Functionalities include error detection and reporting to the machine PLC, various evaluation modes, error statistics, definition options for quality specifications, communication options with external data sources and PLC runtime compensation.
The use of the Sumatra/Postgres process database enables different welding stations to exchange information on the processing status of individual workpieces. Programming in LabVIEW also allows the user interface to be customized according to the customer’s specifications.
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