Ship hull panels
Ship hull flat panels are joined in the factory before assembling the ship modules. For many years, this has been done using automatic welding machines mounted on gantry systems.
The Submerged Arc Welding (SAW) process is used in order to get a high deposition rate combined with high speed (SAW tandem is often used to increase the deposition rate even more).
For thin plate thickness, square butt preparation is the most common joint, but for greater plate thickness V, Y, J, and U preparations are used. On these types of machines an operator is constantly monitoring the process and manually adjusting the joint torch position during welding.
With the help of the laser vision system, monitoring the torch position is not necessary, enabling an operator to supervise two or three machines at the same time. In the case of thick plate, the laser vision systems are also used for multi-pass welding sequence management.
Ship panel stiffener
Large gantry installed in a shipyard with two articulated robots to weld ship panel stiffeners. The robot's tasks are setup using offline programming. The vision systems are used to correct the robot trajectory but also to control the welding parameters in function of the root gap measurement.
In consequence, the customer is saving a tremendous amount of money on consumables by controlling the required deposition rate as a function of the real gap measured by the laser vision system.
Submarine hull butts
Submarines are built up from cylindrical shaped round modules that need to be joined utilizing “hull butt” groove joints. The material thickness is typically 50 mm or greater in thickness which means over 30 passes are used.
Laser vision is used to not only to track the joint but for real time path planning, adaptive process control to take place.
