How to avoid weld smut

When you think of the word ​“smut,” weld­ing may not be the first thing that comes to mind. How­ev­er, the lit­er­al def­i­n­i­tion of smut is ​“a small flake of soot or oth­er dirt.” This def­i­n­i­tion falls in line per­fect­ly with weld smut, which has been dirty­ing up weld­ing since the beginning.

Accord­ing to an arti­cle in The Fab­ri­ca­tor, smut is caused by the boil­ing points of alu­minum and mag­ne­sium being low­er than the tem­per­a­tures that are reached dur­ing arc weld­ing. This caus­es the filler met­al to actu­al­ly evap­o­rate dur­ing the weld­ing process. This caus­es imper­fec­tions along the weld, the smut – a black sub­stance that low­ers the qual­i­ty of the weld.

There are a few good ways to keep your welds free of smut. First, if you are using a shield­ing gas weld­ing for your indus­tri­al robot, you need to make sure that the amount of shield­ing gas avail­able is effi­cient at all times. The arti­cle states that if the gas becomes mar­gin­al, alu­minum and mag­ne­sium are oxi­dized to become weld­ing smut.

Anoth­er way to keep your robot weld­ing smut free is to make sure that the torch angle on your robot is pro­grammed cor­rect­ly. The push angle must be right dur­ing these weld­ing process­es, or smut will occur.

Smut is more com­mon in weld­ing like MIG weld­ing, rather than TIG weld­ing, because met­al filler is get­ting trans­ferred across an arc. MIG weld­ing gets hot­ter than TIG weld­ing, which cas­es more evap­o­ra­tion and the pos­si­bil­i­ty for more smut­ted welding.

Robots​.com will get any com­pa­ny the best new or refur­bished robot­ics sys­tem for their com­pa­ny – one that will keep their com­pa­ny free of weld­ing smut. If you are look­ing to auto­mate your process­es, con­tact us online or at 877−762−6881.