AN ANALYSIS OF RESISTANCE SPOT WELD QUALITY BASED ON ACOUSTIC AND ELECTRICAL SIGNATURES

The union of a set of materials by way of Resistance Spot Welding is designed so that once fused together, a substantial amount of intentional, external force must be applied to separate the contents. Therefore, Resistance Spot Welding is often the preferred fusion method in high-volume manufacturing processes. The result of Resistance Spot Welding however is the formation of a weld nugget which is not visible to the naked eye. Destructive and/or ultrasonic methods applied off-line must be used to determine the quality of each weld; both inefficient and expensive processes. The following research analyzes the data fed back during resistance spot weld sequences in-line and establishes a correlation between emitted characteristics and the final quality of a spot weld. The two characteristics researched to segregate weld quality are: the electrical sin wave signature and the acoustic sin wave signature produced during the welding sequence. Both features were discovered to have a direct correlation to the final quality of a weld once cured. By measuring and comparing these characteristics at the source, an opportunity is presented to decrease time and potential defects by confirming the quality of each weld in-process and at the source