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 lgantries.

The submerged Arc Welding (SAW) process is used in order to get a high deposition rate combined with high speed and SAW tandem is often used to increase the deposition rate even more. For small 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

A shipyard has installed a large gantry with two articulated robots to weld ship panel stiffeners. The robot's tasks are set-up using off-line programming. The vision systems are present to correct the robot trajectory but also to control the welding parameters as a function of the root gap measurement.

Thus, the customer is saving a tremendous amount of money on consumables by having the required deposition rate as a function of the real gap present.

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 50mm or greater in thickness which means over 30 passes are used. 

Laser vision is used to not only track the joint but to allow real time path planning, adaptive processing and process control to take place.