Reduction of power consumption during arc welding operation

The work is devoted to energy saving during arc manual welding operations. Power sources for arc manual welding are rectifiers with slow or steeply falling current-voltage characteristics. The paper considers two ways of energy saving during arc welding operations. The first way is to increase the efficiency of welding by replacing the ballast rheostat with a special electronic device that regulates the welding current instead of the ballast rheostat. The second way is to increase the efficiency of the welding equipment by replacing a traditional one-bridge rectifier with the two-bridge economical rectifier. An approximate calculation of the annual economic effect from the replacement of a ballast rheostat by the electronic regulating device is given on the example of welding operations in a typical assembly shop