Orbital Welding applications and future scope

The industries such as pharma-ceutical industries, aerospace, nuclear, food and diary, semiconductor industries require weld joints with high accuracy. This has fueled the use of orbital welding for such applications. Orbital welding is automatic GTAW process where the tungsten electrode rotates around the tube/pipe while the tube/pipe is stationary. An orbital welding system consists of an orbital weld head and power source.

While designing any part, the focus is to limit the number of joints and manufacture the part from a single structure. However, it is not practical from design as well as manufacturing perspective. The result is the introduction of weld joints at various locations of the design structure. Fusion welding process is useful where the tube/pipe thickness is 3mm or below 3 mm. Such types of tubes are commonly used in the industries mentioned above. Fusion welding does not require any filler material to weld the joints. It ensures that the strength of the joint is maintained after welding due to the fusion of only parent material. Orbital welding is very useful in such cases as it not only ensures accurate welds but it can also help in controlling the heat input, maintaining an inert environment free from oxidation, repeatability of the weld joints and documenting all the weld joint data. Documentation of weld joints is useful to track the welding parameters for each joint and analyze the data. This data is useful to check if any faulty weld joint that was welded using parameters that caused the problem in the weld joint. These industries have pipelines with very intricate design where human access is restricted. Orbital welding machines are useful for welding pipelines with very intricate designs where human access is restricted. The orbital weld head can be designed to accommodate critical joints such as long bends, short bends, tube to flanges, pulled Tee tubes, micro fittings and intricate pipelines used in engines in aerospace industries. Orbital welding machines are portable and user friendly. They are specifically designed to be robust and useful at actual pipeline sites. Orbital welding requires precise preparation techniques such as cutting of the tubes, facing and deburring of the tubes and proper edge preparation of the tubes that will be welded using orbital welding system. Accurate edge preparation techniques result in error free weld joints.

Universal Orbital system Pvt Ltd has been incorporating IOT in orbital power sources since 2018. IOT connectivity of these power sources has helped monitor the welding process, data acquisition, data analysis and data tracking. This machine can be monitored remotely as well and the weld joint data can be accessed anytime. Alerts are sent to Universal Orbital Systems’ service department and thus the users are warned and further mishap is prevented.

Manual welding requires highly skilled labors. As the number of skilled welders is reducing, industries are shifting their focus on automatic or semi-automatic welding techniques. Orbital welding, being an automatic welding process, helps in maintaining the repeatability of the process, maintaining proper documentation and information of every joint that is welded, acquiring weld joints of high strength and high aesthetics. Industries such as pharmaceutical, aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear, food and diary rely on minimum human intervention and depend upon proper documentation techniques, orbital welding is the suitable solution for these industries. In some industries like nuclear, humans accessibility is completely prohibited due to the high radioactivity. In these cases, the part that is to be welded cannot be rotated as well. The only solution in such cases is orbital welding as it does not have the limitation of inaccessibility and tungsten rod rotates around the part hence no need to rotate the part to be welded. With the advancement of technology, influx of semiconductor industries will be observed in many countries.

Semiconductor industry requires very high weld quality and welding equipment that is compatible with the clean room requirements. The micro fittings have very close tolerances and distance between 2 micro-fittings is as low as 12 mm. These stringent requirements can only be met by orbital welding machines. Aerospace industries generally use titanium as the tube material for pipelines in the engines. Titanium requires an inert environment because titanium immediately gets oxidized once exposed to environment after welding. To avoid this, manual welding option is eliminated and orbital welding solution is used. The pipelines used for engines and other aerospace parts have very intricate design and limited accessibility. Orbital weld heads can be designed in such a way that the intricate joints can be accommodated easily. Pharmaceutical industry has stringent requirements of welding such as shielding and purging gas control, weld bead and weld profile. These requirements can be maintained using orbital welding machines with precise control over the process as well as proper documentation of each weld joint.

These examples demonstrate the scope of orbital welding in every industry and how each industry has high demands of orbital welding solution. Orbital welding provides precise solution to such industries keeping in track with every industrial need and continuous improvement in the technology.

Universal Orbital Systems Private Limited
Web : www.orbitronsystems.com