Especially in the car industry, spot and projection resistance welding are commonly used to weld thin sheets of steel and aluminium. Spot welding leaves visible indentations after welding, whereas the company Arplas Systems uses a projection welding method resulting in almost inv
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Especially in the car industry, spot and projection resistance welding are commonly used to weld thin sheets of steel and aluminium. Spot welding leaves visible indentations after welding, whereas the company Arplas Systems uses a projection welding method resulting in almost invisible welds. For spot welding, C- and X-type welding machines are available, but for projection welding machines no X-type variant exists as of yet. This is because projection welding need high precision, high electrode forces and most importantly, fast follow-up characteristics.
In this thesis, the current C-type machine is analyzed and based on those machine characteristics, a design of a robot mounted X-type machine was developed and tested. The prototype of the X-type design was successfully built and is capable of welding both steel and aluminum samples. The design implements the projection welding method of Arplas systems and can be used manually or mounted on a robotic arm.