Joining Challenges in the Automotive Industry

Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) is a major joining process in the automotive industry. The weld quality is critical given that the next-generation of high strength materials are used for battery enclosures which drive a high-quality standard for achieving a leak-free design. However, these next-generation steels can have a propensity for cracking. Thus, an automated and robust process control system is needed for weld quality assurance. Weld quality can be achieved through a real-time RSW process monitoring system towards reliable weld quality inspection, which is challenging due to various process variables and uncertainties. This presentation discusses the challenges of welding next-generation steels and the development of Machine Learning (ML) models to quantitatively correlate weld quality with process variables and in-line processing signal data. This then provides a roadmap for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in RSW through case studies and demonstrates how AI can help engineers to overcome these issues.