Detection of positions in flat and horizontal welding by experimental analysis and machine learning.
Résumé
In the last decade, with the increasing requirement for the quality of equipment, several efforts
have been devoted to the development of new real-time detection technics for weld joints
quality in many industrial fields such as the nuclear, chemical and aeronautical. Welding is a
complicated process, which is often affected by the welding process and environmental
uncertainties, and it is easy to produce welding defects such as overlap, pore, spatter, and
incomplete fusion. In fact, the welding quality control is carried out by a traditional destructive
and non-destructive methods such as macrographs, ultrasonic testing and x-ray detecting.
However, these methods have some limitations: ray detection can easily result in side-effects
on the human body and ultrasonic testing is susceptible to the location, orientation and shape
of the defect. In addition, the in-situ observation of the weld pool dynamics using non-intrusive
instruments will give information about the stability and consequently evaluate the real-time
welding quality. In this study, the objective is to analyze by using several sensors (arc voltage,
current and high-speed cameras), the influence of two welding positions (horizontal, flat) on
the weld pool behavior for the GTAW process. Therefore, the setup configuration according to
the full penetration of weld joint, two cameras are fixed on the front and back side of the work
piece. In the other hand, an algorithm based on computer vision and image processing is
developed including four steps: image acquisition, image preprocessing, weld pool features
extraction and classification. The weld joints were classified into four classes, flat and
horizontal position with two welding speeds. in the second part of the algorithm, different
machine learning methods (KNN, Random Forest…) are tested for detecting and classifying
weld joints on one hand, and on the other hand they are compared by analyzing performance
scores (accuracy, time of calculations…). Actually, image processing and machine learning
combination is trained with extracted features to predict the classification results with a high-
level perspective to realize the real-time intelligent identification of weld surface defects.