Aluminum Welding with Fanuc robots

Alu­minum weld­ing is a process that is becom­ing more and more com­mon in the auto­mo­tive and oth­er indus­tries as com­pa­nies are opt­ing for alu­minum over steel con­struc­tion. Many of these man­u­fac­tur­ers turn to Fanuc Robot­ics and their line of alu­minum welders to han­dle this task.

Alu­minum weld­ing is more dif­fi­cult aes­thet­i­cal­ly than steel weld­ing because it is not as for­giv­ing. It is impor­tant that the man­u­fac­tur­er and the robot oper­a­tor under­stands the process of weld­ing alu­minum and how to con­trol it so that any pit­falls may be side­stepped before they start.

When using Fanuc for alu­minum weld­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ers can turn to the ARC Mate series of robots. The Fanuc arti­cle states that these robots can do the work of ten welders with out­stand­ing cos­met­ic and qual­i­ty standards.

For Fanuc, the alu­minum weld­ing process is broke down into sec­tions: start­ing with the arc, weld for­ma­tion, weld depo­si­tion, arc end­ing and burn back. Once a robot­ic alu­minum weld­ing sys­tem gets through start­ing the arc, the hard­est part of alu­minum weld­ing is over.

From there, it is a mat­ter of decid­ing which weld­ing tech­nique will be used for the alu­minum work piece. There are three dif­fer­ent tech­niques, includ­ing run-in, ramp­ing and direct entry. Run-in is the most com­mon tech­nique for alu­minum weld­ing. How­ev­er, if man­u­fac­tur­ers do not want to use run-in, they can use ramp­ing for thick­er mate­ri­als and direct entry for thin­ner materials.

If the man­u­fac­tur­er is using a Fanuc alu­minum welder, the qual­i­ty of the weld will be increased because of the weld sta­bi­liza­tion process and weld depo­si­tion will be high­er. Then the weld is end­ed and the weld wire is sep­a­rat­ed from the weld pud­dle dur­ing burn back.

With Fanuc Robot­ics, alu­minum weld­ing is just a mat­ter of fol­low­ing the steps and prop­er programming.

Robots​.com, a cer­ti­fied inte­gra­tor for Fanuc Robot­ics, has sev­er­al alu­minum weld­ing options avail­able for our cus­tomers. If you are look­ing for an alu­minum weld­ing robot option, con­tact us online or at 877−762−6881.