The acoustic emission signal of aluminum alloys spot welding includes the information of forming nugget and is one of the important parameters in the quality control. Due to the nonlinearity of the signals, classic Euclidean geometry can not be applied to depict exactly. The fractal theory is implemented to quantitatively describe the characteristics of the acoustic emission signals. The experiment and calculation results show that the box counting dimension of acoustic emission signal, between 1 and 2, are distinctive from different nugget areas in AC spot welding. It is proved that box counting dimension is an effective characteristic parameter to evaluate spot welding quality. In addition, fractal theory can also be applied in other spot welding parameters, such as voltage, current, electrode force and so on, for the purpose of recognizing the spot welding quality.
This investigation was performed to study acoustic field signal in order to improve RSW quality. Researchers firstly built an acoustic array sensor system, which included 8 MPA-416 acoustic sensors, data acquisition card and LabVIEW. The system obtained the acoustic field information in the process of nugget growing. Due to the nonlinearity field signal, array sensor algorithm was utilized to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of acoustie field and reduced noise. The experiment and calculation results show that array sensor system can acquire acoustic field signal of nugget growing in the RSW process and array processing algorithm based on acoustic field can extract characteristic parameters to evaluate RSW quality. It was concluded that the acoustic array sensor system offers a new methodology for RSW quality inspection.
