The term digitalisation of production is first and foremost associated with optimising processes in order to increase profitability. But digitalisation goes much further and opens up opportunities for more sustainability. This is a goal that every company must pursue nowadays.
The constant progress in technical development has already resulted in valuable optimisations: Controlled short arcs have been further developed, pulsed arcs have been further improved, new spray arcs now achieve an even better penetration. These are all further developments that have been achieved through digital processes in the power source.
The intended progress, however, starts one step higher: In the digitalisation of a welding process within a complete production line. With the focus on the following 4 aspects, you can achieve optimisations through digitalisation.
1. Determine consumptions
In gas-shielded welding, you can collect the electrical parameters, measure the gas and wire consumption and the energy consumption of the welding power source. Every data management system integrated in a welding power source provides this data nowadays.
2. Compare welding workstations
In a further step, you can compare the consumption of individual welding cells, welding workstations and even the entire production line. In this way, you can collect productivity data and make further optimisations as required. This is also possible with today's state of the art technology.
3. Collect quality data
While you measure the electrical parameters during a welding process, the quality is monitored in parallel. Thereby you can see which deviations of the parameters lead to quality losses. This requires that you have defined so-called tolerance fields via your system for quality determination. Measurements outside the tolerance fields are therefore an index for deviations and errors in production.
4. Determine CO2 footprint
Determining the carbon footprint is not yet part of the current state of the art. However, systems for this are under development. If you measure the consumption of individual welding workstations and include all components, you have all the data you need to determine the CO2 footprint. In the case of a welding robot cell, for example, the consumption of the welding robot and the welding fume extraction system are also important variables that must be included in the calculation.
Target: Determine CO2 equivalent for a product
Customer requirements are constantly increasing. The first inquiries about the carbon footprint for the production of a component are now also reaching us.
Would you also like to be able to say in future: "During the welding of our product X, a CO2 footprint of Y kg CO2 equivalent was produced"? Briefly noted: CO2 equivalent means that in addition to carbon dioxide (CO2), other gases such as methane, nitrous oxide, fluorocarbons etc. are involved in the greenhouse effect. Each of these greenhouse gases has an individual effect on global warming. Measuring only CO2 emissions would not provide complete data.
If at some point we are able to determine the CO2 equivalents for a product, this will be a significant step in welding technology. Thus, digitalisation still offers many possible applications in welding technology.
Sustainability will become an even more important topic. Please also have a look at the video on this subject:
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