WSM4.0 — Welding System Monitoring

Official title: «Welding System Monitoring 4.0 — high-speed monitoring and data-acquisition system for industrial welding processes».

Goal

The Welding System Monitoring 4.0 (WSM4.0) project, submitted to the Tuscany Region’s 2020 RSI call in a consortium with an industrial lead partner, two other companies and the university, set out to study and build, at prototype level, a high-speed monitoring and data-acquisition system for industrial welding processes (TIG, MIG, submerged arc).

Not every welding process can be automated with robots: where the operator’s manual skill remains central, the system continuously acquires the process parameters — voltages, currents, temperatures —, sends them via ethernet or radio to a collection and monitoring station, and gives the operator feedback to correct and optimise the weld in real time. The aim is to raise quality and traceability and reduce non-conformities, including on older machines still in wide use. Planned duration: 18 months from the summer of 2020.

What was done

The technical sheet lays the work out in three operational goals: preliminary study and definition of the specifications, design of the system, construction of the prototype and testing on welding machines. Within the consortium, BE Care’s contribution covered the IT side: the study of the communication protocols between system and subsystems, the materials and process-parameter database designed for the cloud, compatible with Azure servers, the firmware of the data-acquisition device, system-to-operator and system-to-PC communication, the Windows software for graphical analysis of the process, and the preparation of the database for Android and iOS apps.

As far as the documents go

The preserved document is the technical sheet of the application, from July 2020: it describes goals, architecture and work plan in detail. No final report with results was found, nor documentation on the outcome of the call: this page stops where the documents stop.