Resistance welding is widely applied in manufacturing industry for assemblies of metal parts. In the fast-moving world of manufacturing, welding is a critical step that holds all parts together. Yet for engineers and production teams, welding could also mean challenges where production slows, costs rise, and quality slips. The traditional methods for solving welding problems rely on reactive approaches with extensive trial-and-error tests, operator expertise, and reactive troubleshooting. These methods are time-consuming, costly, and often inefficient.
From Reactive troubleshooting to Proactive prevention by Digital Solutions
SORPAS® is built on three digital technologies:
- Simulation
- Digital Optimization
- Digital Twins
With SORPAS® digital technologies, manufacturers can move from firefighting to foresight. Instead of waiting for defects to happen, the welding problems can be predicted, prevented and minimized across the entire welding production lifecycle:
- Pre-production: Design and plan welding right the first weld.
- Welding production: Keep process stable and quality consistent.
- Post-production: Prove weld quality and performance.
Digital Optimizations play an essential role in this transformation for reducing the risk of many welding problems before they occur, enhancing production stability, and improving weld quality consistency across shifts, batches, and material variations.
Pre-Production – Designing and Planning to Get It Right the First Weld
Before making the first weld, many questions need to be answered. Could the selected materials be welded together? Would the joint design be strong enough to bear the real loads? Traditionally, these questions are answered through trial-and-error tests by building prototypes, testing, adjusting, and repeating. With SORPAS® simulations, the questions can be answered before any metal is cut. The software simulates heat flow, nugget formation, and weld strengths for different designs and materials quickly within hours, not weeks.
After the weld design with selected materials proved to work, the next question to ask is how easy or difficult these materials can be welded? What are the best welding parameters to have a stable production? These would need a lot more weld tests to find out. With the digital optimizations, welding parameter combinations can be virtually simulated and optimized to find the ideal settings for quality, stability, and electrode life. Thereby the production-ready weld schedules can be obtained virtually before the production. This will eliminate trials, save time, and give the production team confidence from the very first weld.
Welding Production – Keeping Production Stable, Quality Consistent
Once production begins, maintaining stability becomes the real challenge. Even with a perfect setup, factors like electrode wear, material variability, or environmental changes can cause quality to drift, and defects like expulsions and false welds etc. SORPAS® digital optimizations can improve the welding parameters by applying more realistic materials data, welding equipment and process related data. This will elevate the stability and robustness of the welding process thereby reducing the problems occurring during the welding production.
When the digital twin technology becomes available in the near future, it will be possible to connect directly to the welding line. By comparing live process data to a validated simulation model data, it can spot subtle deviations early – long before defects appear in the finished product. If parameters start to drift, the digital twin can recommend corrections or feed them directly into adaptive control systems for automatic adjustments. This keeps weld quality consistent across shifts, batches, and production cycles.
Post-Production – Proving Weld Quality and Performance
When welding is complete, quality and performance still need to be proven. Traditional destructive testing can be slow, costly, and wasteful to check every weld.
By using SORPAS® simulations, it is possible to replicate the welding process with actual welding production parameters and predict the welding quality results. With SORPAS®.testing, it is further possible to simulate the weld strength tests, such as lap shear test, cross tension test, couch peel test etc. Thereby the weld strengths and the failures modes can be predicted with the 3D testing simulations.
Case Studies: Digital Welding Solutions by SORPAS®
Digital Solutions of Welding Problems
Detecting the root causes of welding issues often requires numerous physical weld tests by trial and error due to lack of effective tools to reveal inside the weld zone during the highly dynamic welding process.
Digital solutions by numerical simulations and optimizations can replace most of physical weld tests and provide insights into the welding process. They can visualize the heat development in materials, predict the weld nugget formation and weld strengths, and optimize the welding process settings before launching the welding production.
On the following pages, we present how to use the digital solutions by numerical simulations and optimizations to make good weld designs, achieve stable welding productions, and produce high-quality welds.
Common Welding Problems
Here we share some common resistance welding problems with possible root causes and solutions.
False weld (cold weld)
Weld splash
Gap between sheets
Liquid metal embrittlement (LME)
Electrode degradation