Among the projects presented by the Polytechnics at the Festival of Innovation Projects “Sikorsky Challenge:, visitors attention was attracted to the work devoted to contact spot welding. Such technology is widely used in automotive, instrumentation and other industries. The development of the department of electric welding plants of ZF provides a significant improvement in the quality of welded joints of materials with different thermophysical characteristics compared to traditional technology. The mechanical characteristics of the welded joint, made according to the developed technology, are significantly improved: the destructive effort is cut by 10% and 50% – on the gap. In addition, the proposed method provides energy savings by reducing the energy consumption compared to the standard technology of obtaining welded joints with regulated geometric parameters of the point.
The developed method is based on the influence of the magnetic field of the special configuration on the liquid metal connection directly during welding. Such a transverse counter-symmetric magnetic field is generated in the welding zone by a four-pole electromagnetic system fixed on the electrodes of the serial machine for point contact welding. In this case, the ponderomotive forces that arise during the vector interaction of the magnetic field with the welding current provide an intensive mixing of the entire volume of the liquid metal nucleus of the point. The proposed configuration of the magnetic field allows us to significantly improve the characteristics of the metal connection, while not distorting the geometric shape of the weld point.
To date, technological recommendations for welding structures have been developed and a set of laboratory equipment for the implementation of the method has been developed. Further work involves the creation of a set of equipment for industrial use and the definition of technological recommendations for the application of the proposed method of welding for compounds containing components from light alloys.
The developers of the proposed method are the staff of the department of electric welding plants associate professor V.V. Kochubei, prof. R.M. Rizov, assistant professor I.O.Skachkov. At some stages of the development were involved associate professor. P.Yu.Sydorenko and engineer V.A.Bolshyi. Also, the students of senior courses took part in the work. According to the results of the research, about 20 diploma projects and 10 master's theses were defended. The results of the work are protected by the three patents on the utility model of Ukraine, given in 10 papers published in the leading scientific publications in Ukraine and abroad.