The robot beam welding work station by ZPMC, the first one in China, was put into operation in Changxing Branch recently, a typical model of restructuring.

The work station is mainly designed for welding on long, deep and narrow beam structures of STSs with complicated internal structures, which has welded beams of different sizes, specifications and types for 8 projects. The welding features sound seam with the qualified rate above 98%, better than the manual operation. It also save the welding materials by 18% approximately and labor force by 60% approximately, thus, improving the efficiency by 30% approximately.

The work station consists of the equipment monitoring system, parameter programming system and robot welding system. The equipment monitoring system can be used to make real time monitoring on the equipment state, including the using of welding wires and the gas pressure, for quantitative analysis. The parameter programming system can be developed on the basis of different beam structures, with which the adjustment can be made on the size and interval of clapboards and order of welding seams for beams of different sizes, making sure the minimum welding deformation. The laser and welding wire integrated technique is used in the robot welding system to make sure the accurate positioning on pieces with position error. Meanwhile, the preset robot welding program can be used to shorten the time for structure demonstration or general offline programming as well as to improve the robot efficiency greatly. The work station is considered the intelligent welding equipment with integration of multiple innovative welding and sensing techniques, of which many techniques are initialized in China. The fully automatic welding can be made with one-touch startup of the work station.

The work station will improve the quality and efficiency greatly and promote the development of automatic equipment technology of ZPMC .