Looking at a classic pipe welding company, the following picture usually emerges: pipe sections are lying on the hall floor, individual pipe sections are placed on trestles and are welded together at individual workstations by a welding specialist. Root welding, layer welding, cover layer welding – everything is done manually and costs time. These companies are finding it increasingly difficult to meet their customers' deadlines, because the shortage of skilled workers is omnipresent. Even if an employer is lucky enough to have enough welders available, delivery times often cannot be kept because production takes too much time. Even personnel costs are out of proportion when the order situation is good, if efficiency cannot be increased to meet the required order volume. Many pure pipe welding companies are therefore faced with high automation pressure.
Challenges in pipe welding
In the prefabrication of pipes, everything revolves around time – and of course quality. Many different pipes and pipe sizes from 2 inches (50 mm) to 60 inches (1500 mm) are welded in pipe prefabrication. However, not every pipe arrives perfectly circular in this production step, but rather has tolerances that have to be compensated for during welding. These are the worst possible conditions for automation. The requirements for an automated system are therefore maximum flexibility when changing from one component to another and the ability to compensate for tolerances. When automating the prefabrication of pipes, the know-how of the welding specialist is used, transferred to the database of a so-called collaborating robot – such as the SWR pipe welding cobot from ABICOR BINZEL – and made available to other operators of the system by means of a PLC.
Functionality of pipe welding robots in the prefabrication of pipes
Automation in pipe welding means that the pipe to be welded is attached to a so-called positioner, which ensures that the pipe rotates continuously with an automatic turning device. At the same time, the welding work is taken over by a robot that welds the root, all intermediate layers as well as the cover layer without interruption. The operation of such a collaborating robot is very simple and can easily be carried out by an operator. In this way, one welding specialist can operate several pipe welding robots, while a colleague is tacking and preparing the workpieces, for example. This means high speed, productivity and system availability with guaranteed consistent quality at the same time.
With a pipe welding robot like the SWR, medium to large-sized companies in particular can automate the production of their pipes more easily. A return on investment can be achieved with such a robot after less than two years.
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