Introduction to The Fully Automatic Projection Welding Workstation for Car Door Ring

With the requirements for lightweight and safety of the car body, car door rings were born. car door rings include AB pillars, door sills, top frames, etc., which are hot stamped as a whole after laser welding; because of the use of hot forming technology, the overall strength of the door ring is increased from 900Mpa to 1500Mpa, and the weight of the door ring is reduced by 20%; because of these advantages, car door rings are becoming more and more popular in mainstream car companies. The nuts on the door rings are mostly welded by projection welding. The original AB pillar projection welding was welded in the form of manual + tooling. Due to the large size and heavy weight of the door ring, automatic projection welding must be used for safety and quality factors.

Process Analysis

The one-piece door ring adopts hot stamping technology, and the strength before welding is about 1500 Mpa, and it has aluminum silicon coating. Therefore, its projection welding process is similar to the projection welding of a single AB column, and hard standard welding is required, that is, short time, high current, and high pressure. The equipment selection mostly adopts capacitor energy storage projection welding machine; due to the use of automatic projection welding, it is necessary to consider adding floating mechanism while ensuring the accurate positioning of the workpiece to adapt to the incomplete fit between the product and the electrode to ensure the welding quality.

Welding Solution

Scheme layout:

Through CCD camera recognition, the robot grabs the material from the material car, and then moves to the double-head welding machine, the nut conveyor sends the nut, automatically shifts the welding, and then the robot moves it to the unloading station for automatic spot welding.

Description of successful solution

1. Loading station: Take photos from the material cart through CCD, control the coordinate accuracy to ±0.5mm, position through the latch, and then clamp the workpiece to take it out
2. Welding station: Due to the large size of the door ring and the matching of two nuts, Ageracustomized an ultra-high double-head energy storage welder with a working height of 1.8MM,and equipped with two conveyors to meet the conveying and welding of flange nuts and four-corner nuts;
3. Data collection and traceability: Collect welding parameters such as welding current, pressure, displacement, and can expand laser coding to trace the production data of the product, connect with the factory’s MES, and realize closed-loop management.

Testing and verification:

The welding test was conducted by testing the ejection force with a universal testing machine and the torque with a torque meter, both of which met the OEM standard and more than 1.5 times; the position of the nuts was tested in small batches and the consistency of the welding was verified, both of which met the design requirements.

Conclusion

The robot automatic projection welding of the one-piece door ring meets the needs of production capacity, quality and safety. There is still room for improvement in the workstation form in the future. For example, the material cart + CCD is currently used for loading. The material cart can only hold about 20 pieces and needs to be replaced frequently. The CCD uses 3D vision, which is expensive. The subsequent connection with the forming and cutting workstation will greatly improve the transfer efficiency of the workpiece and reduce the cost.

Agera is a company engaged in the development of automated assembly, welding, testing equipment and production lines, which are mainly used in home appliance hardware, automobile manufacturing, sheet metal, 3C electronics industry, etc. According to customer needs, we can develop and customize various welding machines and automated welding equipment, assembly welding production lines, assembly lines, etc., to provide suitable overall automation solutions for enterprise transformation and upgrading, and help enterprises quickly realize the transformation and upgrading of traditional production methods to mid-to-high-end production methods. If you are interested in our automated equipment and production lines, please contact us.