Online evaluation of resistance spot welding quality and defect classification

Resistance spot welding (RSW) is widely used in industrial product manufacturing, and weld quality is critical to ensure the safety and reliability of mechanical structures. With product quality improvement, the online monitoring of weld quality has become an urgent issue. Therefore, a method for online evaluation of RSW quality and automatic classification of welding defects based on mild steel is proposed. By acquiring the welding current and electrode voltage signals of the welding process in real time, a finite impulse response low-pass filter based on the Blackman window function is designed to perform zero-phase filtering of the dynamic resistance (DR). The influence of three welding parameters on the nugget diameter and shear strength of spot welding of DC01 mild steel was studied through the control variable method to determine the optimum welding parameters. Since the main defects of the RSW process are classified as expulsion defects and incomplete fusion defects, minor adjustments were made to the welding parameters to produce expulsion and incomplete fusion defects. Features in the time domain are extracted from the DR curves signals of normal, expulsion, and incomplete fusion welding spots, and the performance of the extracted features in the classifier is analyzed. Improvements are made to classify normal and expulsion spots with low accuracy, a new method is proposed that can accurately classify the quality of the welding spots. Through online evaluation tests of quality on 200 welding spots, the online evaluation test showed results that closely matched the validation test results. The results of the classification performance tests show that this study can be used for online evaluation of RSW quality and automatic classification of the welding spot defects of the DC01.