Welding costs cut

Previously Kverneland was using ESAB’s Marathon Pac bulk drums of welding wire, which contain far more wire than conventional spools, but the recently added ‘endless’ technology features a portable butt-welding device to join the end of one Marathon Pac drum to the start of the next so the robotic welding operation is never interrupted. Kverneland can now leave the robot cells running overnight, unattended, which is saving the company approximately £10-15,000 per year.

Furthermore, Kverneland no longer has to scrap the wire at the end of the Marathon Pac, which it previously had to do sometimes in order to avoid the wire running out mid-weld.

ESAB FILARC PZ6105R is a metal-cored wire for robotic welding of single- and multi-pass fillet welds in the downhand and horizontal/vertical positions. As welded, the typical mechanical properties are 32 % elongation, tensile strength of 558 MPa, yield strength of 453 MPa and a Charpy impact value of 55 J at -40°C. Depending on the welding parameters and wire feed speed, 1.4 mm diameter PZ6105R can be deposited at rates of up to 7.2 kg/h. Thanks to these properties and the wire’s excellent start performance, arc stability and good feeding characteristics, FILARC PZ6105R has proved to be an outstanding choice for welding Kverneland’s ploughs.

To help maximise the productivity of its robot welding cells, Kverneland invited ESAB’s Value Added Engineering (VAE) team to undertake a study. Odd Lorentz Pettersen, Team Leader at Kverneland Group Operations AS, explains: “The VAE team analyzed the welding process for each segment of the welds and undertook tests at the ESAB Process Centre in Gothenberg. They then made recommendations for the robot welding speeds so that we could reduce the cycle time without compromising quality. All six robots are different, and they all perform slightly different welding operations, so the VAE team had to look in detail at all six robot cells. As a result of the VAE project, we are now saving about £20,000 per year.”