SmartDress · Adaptive Tip dress Control for Automated Resistance Spot Welding

High volume automotive production (such as body-in-white construction) operations rely heavily on RSW (resistance spot welding), and suffer significant losses of output (and resulting revenue) as a consequence of frequent production line stoppages. These stoppages are predominantly caused by weld quality issues, which in turn arise from poor maintenance of consumable ‘tips’ on RSW guns.SmartDress will develop a fully automated adaptive control system that will optimise, monitor and maintain tip quality in these applications. This will minimise line stoppages and give provide our consortium of tier 2/3 SME automotive suppliers with an IP protectable, ‘high-tech’ product, enabling us to protect and expand our market share – which is shrinking due to competition from low-labour rate competitor countries.Another key feature of the SmartDress system will be that it will allow cost-competitive manufacture of aluminium (not currently commercially viable), which will enable lower cost aluminium vehicle manufacture. This could have very large potential impact on CO2 emissions (due to vehicle light-weighting).