Estimation of Contact Tip to Work Distance (CTWD) using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in GMAW

Abstract

A method for optimizing monitoring by using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique was proposed based on instability of arc voltage signal and welding current signal of solid wire electrode (GMAW). This technique is not only for effective process modeling, but also to illustrate the correlation between the input and output parameters responses. The algorithms of monitoring were developed in time domain by carrying out the Moving Average (M.A) and Root Mean Square (RMS) based on the welding experiment parameters such as travel speed, thickness of specimen, feeding speed, and wire electrode diameter to detect and estimate with a satisfactory sample size. Experiment data was divided into three subsets: train (70%), validation (15%), and test (15%). Error back-propagation of Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm was used to train for this algorithm. The proposed algorithms on this paper were used to estimate the variety the Contact Tip to Work Distance (CTWD) through Mean Square Error (MSE). Based on the results, the algorithms have shown that be able to detect changes in CTWD automatically and real time with takes 0.147 seconds (MSE 0.0087).