Hello everyone. This will be my first post and already I am excited. I am relatively new to the welding world (and life after college actually) and even though I have a full year on the job as a Process Engineer for Orbital Welding, there is so many things that have eluded me and that I seek to learn about. Prior to making this post, I have looked over past Welding Journal magazines and tried to search around the forum for past postings and noticed that there aren't a lot of postings about Orbital Welding machines. Hopefully I may be able to find some guidance from someone after I make this post.
I have noticed that there is a set of guidelines that most welders use when performing groove welds on tubes (0.065" wall thickness and below) such as "1 amp per every 0.001 of a tube's wall thickness". However, most of the guidelines I see are applicable for stainless steel, specifically 316. I was wondering when it comes to orbital welding Inconel 625, 718 and Titanium (such as AMS 4943), what guidelines do you recommend or follow in order to develop a weld program/schedule? I used to go with what the following website indicates but it seems that, again, it's applicable more for Stainless Steel than for anything else.
http://www.pro-fusiononline.com/welding/applications/orbital.htmIn general, I am interested in developing the right weld parameters for an orbital welding program. Currently, at work, we use MK Products ACL as well as Orbitalum OrbiMAT 165CA. Although both offer an auto-generate procedure option, they tend to not provide good results (i.e. there's not enough penetration, underfill, undercut, etc). I do adjust the program's parameters through trial and error but this is rather time consuming and I sometimes feel that I'm just completely lost. Even when I do get a good program setting, a few days later, that weld program would now yield bad results. What do you guys recommend when designing a weld program from scratch? What do you guys suggests as far as settings (i.e. keeping the peak-to-background current ratio 3:1 or 2:1, increasing downslope time, having the same values for pulse time, etc)? What tips would you share to a welding engineer just starting out in this field? Does anyone have experience using MK Product's ACL machine or Orbitalum?
My apologies if this is a long post and if I asked multiple questions consecutively. As you see, these questions have been on my mind for quite some time and I know that most of weld discontinuities and defects (especially porosity and Lack of Penetration on Titanium welds) my work experiences may be due to the weld schedules.
Thank you all for your time. May you have a good day.
-Luis
