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Friction Stir Welding

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  • Friction Stir Welding

    I was unaware of this welding process but apparently it's been around for awhile:



    SpaceX used the same process for the Falcon 1 and now a new machine will be used for the heavy lift rocket:

    NASA unveils new welding equipment at Michoud Assembly Facility in eastern New Orleans | NOLA.com

  • #2
    more unemployment

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    • #3
      I've been thinking for a while that the days of the skilled metal worker as a trade are over. Soon blacksmiths will be all that is left.
      If you are emotionally invested in 'believing' something is true you have lost the ability to tell if it is true.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by tankie View Post
        more unemployment
        For skilled welders sure but more employment for robot technicians and programmers and robotics engineering and cheaper/more reliable goods. This is called creative destruction.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Monash View Post
          I've been thinking for a while that the days of the skilled metal worker as a trade are over. Soon blacksmiths will be all that is left.

          I work for a company that manufactures natural gas compressors and I doubt very much that will ever happen in ours or any industry that requires vessel and piping components that are rated for pressures above 15psi. About 20 years ago a rival company bought a robotic welder capable of producing welds comparable to what our b-welders are required to do. There was a write up in the paper and the company's owner was yapping away about how this machine would replace 3 b-welders. About a year later we had a guy start for us who used to work for our rival. When asked how the robotic welder was working out he just laughed. It's repair rate was a joke and no amount of fine tuning was ever able to get it to produce welds that could get it to consistently pass x-ray. In no time at all, it ended up under tarps never to be used again. Since then, our company has looked at the robot welding option on about 3 different occasions. The last one was supposed to be guaranteed as a viable option but when it was demoed, it couldn't even put in a root pass that would get by visual examination never mind x-ray. They made 6 attempts and they seemed to get worse with each try. Even if they could come up with a machine capable of producing consistent quality x-ray-able welds, the simple plain fact is that it's use would be limited to straight run spools so to get the most out of it, more break flanges would be required which drives up the product cost nullifying any benefit derived from purchasing the thing in the first place.

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          • #6
            Thats good news for welders however with the advance of tech , the writings on the wall , and its not just welders , all industries are under threat in some way or other from manual labour being over ridden by tech , itstarted with the industrial revolution and has no intent of stopping .IMO

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            • #7
              Originally posted by mako88sb View Post
              I work for a company that manufactures natural gas compressors and I doubt very much that will ever happen in ours or any industry that requires vessel and piping components that are rated for pressures above 15psi. About 20 years ago a rival company bought a robotic welder capable of producing welds comparable to what our b-welders are required to do. There was a write up in the paper and the company's owner was yapping away about how this machine would replace 3 b-welders. About a year later we had a guy start for us who used to work for our rival. When asked how the robotic welder was working out he just laughed. It's repair rate was a joke and no amount of fine tuning was ever able to get it to produce welds that could get it to consistently pass x-ray. In no time at all, it ended up under tarps never to be used again. Since then, our company has looked at the robot welding option on about 3 different occasions. The last one was supposed to be guaranteed as a viable option but when it was demoed, it couldn't even put in a root pass that would get by visual examination never mind x-ray. They made 6 attempts and they seemed to get worse with each try. Even if they could come up with a machine capable of producing consistent quality x-ray-able welds, the simple plain fact is that it's use would be limited to straight run spools so to get the most out of it, more break flanges would be required which drives up the product cost nullifying any benefit derived from purchasing the thing in the first place.
              It doesn't mean it can't be done mate. When they integrate that robot with the right sensor and computer vision equipment, watch out.

              Then again, if they give you real time reign over a robot like that, with a natural control scheme, better articulation and finer motion control than your hands and body, no fatigue and augmented vision for better real time quality assessment, imagine what you could do. You'll be the surgeon of natural gas compressors.

              Originally posted by tankie View Post
              Thats good news for welders however with the advance of tech , the writings on the wall , and its not just welders , all industries are under threat in some way or other from manual labour being over ridden by tech , itstarted with the industrial revolution and has no intent of stopping .IMO
              Tankie, automation is now seriously disrupting the labor market, but then again, so did the Industrial Revolution. When the Industrial Revolution happened, for a while a lot of crafts men were out of work, people worried that the machines would displace people in the labor force, and the common man would thereby lose his livelihood. This did happen for a while, before society figured out new ways to harness the excess productive capacity, and economic growth exploded.

              We had this with industrialization, with computers, and now we're having it again with robots (finally). For a while our economy will once again be in a funk as productivity growth disrupts the labor market and with it existing modes of market driven wealth distribution, but I think we will eventually figure out new things to build and new industries that will leverage the new productive capacity to employ and enrich more people. When that happens we will once again have explosive economic growth.

              Civilization advances in jolts and lurches, which is some times mind-blowingly terrific and sometimes absolutely depressing for us common folk. :)

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              • #8
                /\ I know ?

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by tankie View Post
                  /\ I know ?
                  Yep, just emphatically agreeing with you.

                  I wonder where the growth will come from though. A few things I've been thinking about:

                  Personalization. With the new manufacturing technologies coming into play (3D printing, robotics manufacturing driven by computer models), you might be able to have greater personalization without breaking economies of scale. Incredibly rapid prototyping technology is even moving into things like metal stamping:





                  Inhospitable locations. With extensive automation and remote presence technology we see in robots, UAVs, UGVs UUVs, it's going to become easier to build things in locations like space, the ocean floor, the poles, remote deserts, deep underground etc.

                  I actually think we'll move most of our industrial production out into space, but that's at least 50 or 100 years out. Actually, maybe we'll start on this planet with raw materials refinement underground or on the sea floor.
                  Last edited by citanon; 22 Jul 13,, 22:46.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by citanon View Post
                    It doesn't mean it can't be done mate. When they integrate that robot with the right sensor and computer vision equipment, watch out.

                    Then again, if they give you real time reign over a robot like that, with a natural control scheme, better articulation and finer motion control than your hands and body, no fatigue and augmented vision for better real time quality assessment, imagine what you could do. You'll be the surgeon of natural gas compressors.
                    Sure, anything is possible but I still stand by my comment. Submerged arc welding(SAW) has been around for quite awhile and is probably the robotic welders main competition it has to prove itself against in our industry. I asked my boss once how much the robotic welder was they were looking at. He only commented that a SAW set-up is a fraction of the cost. So to offset, the huge price difference, there would have to be a substantial cut in weld production time vs the SAW. There's ways of increasing metal deposition rates but what ever you come up with for robotic welding could just as easily be applied to SAW. So how is a robotic welder supposed to pay for it's huge capital cost outlay? B-welders are our highest paid tradesmen so having someone operate the robotic welder at say half the wage is about the only way. How long would it take for a $20 per hour wage difference to offset the higher cost of the robotic welder? Now keeping that in mind, consider this. We have 3 SAW's in our department and there were plans to get some of the night-shift b-welders trained up on them so they cold be used 20 hr's/ day instead of just 10. It didn't seem to matter how busy we got, it just never happened. The main reason is that SAW's are pretty well limited to straight run spools only just like robotic welders would be. Once those are out of the way, the b-welder operating the SAW can switch over to other types of welding processes and carry on working on almost any other type of pipe spool that one of our regular booths can handle. When the robotic welder runs out of straight runs, it would be sitting idle just like the SAW's but the operator who is not a b-welder due to the cost savings wouldn't be able to weld on pressure components. So not only is the robotic welder idle, but the welding booth it's occupying. That's a large square footage footprint btw with some of the set-ups I've seen.

                    I should point out that we did get a robotic pipe profiler about a year ago for the vessel shop. It is a definite time saver when it comes to cutting the nozzle holes in the vessel shells. Very impressive to watch it at work and no jobs have been lost. One guy still required to operate it and the other 2 that would of been needed to match it's output were simply assigned to other tasks. Ours is pretty similar to this:

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