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The situation of a lack of welding specialists on the market is very tense and will not change in the foreseeable future. This is particularly difficult for companies that mainly manufacture hand-welded products, such as complex pipe structures. Welding has to be carried out three-dimensionally and in several layers. Welders who weld such constructions require special knowledge and skills – and are becoming increasingly rare on the market. There is a lack of young welding specialists.

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.

Pipeline construction is a tough business that depends on quality and speed. Especially in the construction of onshore pipelines, there are still more than 90 % welders who weld the pipes manually. The pressure for welders is particularly high in this production sector because:

To start a TIG welding process, the arc must be ignited to create an electrically conductive path between the tungsten electrode and the workpiece. The high temperature generated when the arc is ignited ensures that the shielding gas becomes electrically conductive. The ignition process in TIG welding is an important process that determines the further course of the weld and its quality.

Anyone who welds high-quality metals and wants clean and visually appealing weld seams should use a TIG welding torch. In TIG welding, non-melting tungsten electrodes – also called TIG electrodes – are used. A tungsten electrode can be called an absolutely essential part of a TIG welding torch, because it has a significant influence on the success of a weld seam as required.

The quality of a weld seam depends on many factors, above all good tools. Welding torches from quality manufacturers are nowadays already technically very highly developed. With new developments, it is often just the little things that make a torch even better. A high-speed camera used in the ARCLab research and development laboratory at ABICOR BINZEL provides important insights for optimisation approaches.

A torch neck and its wear parts are exposed to very high thermal loads during welding. The warmer a welding torch gets, the worse it is for its service life. If, on the other hand, a welding torch remains cool during welding, its wear parts are longer usable. During torch development, great importance is therefore attached to keeping the front end of a welding torch as cool as possible. In the ABICOR BINZEL research and development laboratory ARCLab, among the approx. 100 measuring, testing and analysis systems for torches and wear parts, there is a test rig on which the heating of a torch during the welding process can be made visible.

Muscle pain and tension are almost an inevitable part in welding. But there are ways to avoid them.

Occupational health and safety for welders should be at the top of every manufacturing company's agenda. But some employers have a difficult task in convincing their welding specialists of the best means to extract harmful welding fumes: fume extraction torches.

What exactly is the strain on a welding specialist? How can this physical strain be reduced and is it even possible to prove it? As a professor of joining technology, I get to the bottom of these questions scientifically.