| Abstract Scope |
Most of the world has made an analog to digital transformation, however much of the welding world still exists in an analog, manual, labor intensive world. While power supplies and robots have gone digital, most design and weld process data used by these tools still comes from a human manually entering information from sources that do not have a defined data structure.
One foundational issue that plagues fabricators of all sizes is that welds are almost always specified on a 2D drawing. Both a large quantity of welding symbols and symbols that call out welds in multiple locations make it impractical to create a “list” or database of welds from a drawing. Whether qualifying by testing or using prequalified procedures, many of the weld joint preparation variables needed for procedure qualification are not in the welding symbol. A moderately complex groove weld preparation has >12 design essential variables to describe the materials and groove geometry. This requires the welding engineer to manually search other sources of information for the required variables and manually populate them in whatever tool they are using to assign WPSs.
Given the global welding skill shortage and cost challenges of fabricating, large and small fabricators alike would benefit greatly from an industry standard for specifying weld design and process variables. As there are many processes and tools in this landscape, an industry standard protocol to pass data between design, manufacturing, and quality systems would be extremely beneficial. One could speculate that if standards and protocols exist, it would reduce the barrier for software companies to produce efficient and cost-effective software to help design weld processes, assure code compliance, and produce effective quality documentation. As many other industries have experienced, we would also expect significant benefits resulting from data analytics from the defined data sources. |