Busway distribution system-sizing & planning aspects for automotive weld shop

Resistance spot welding with its characteristic “dirty electrical load” is a distinctive engineering problem. The wide range of its industrial applications has made the subject an exciting research domain. Owing to the intermittence of a welding operation, random overlapping of welding pulses, its sensitivity to voltage variation, and application-specific quality control requirements, the electrical distribution system for welding loads need to be tied strongly with the process-related requirements. One of the most important applications of resistance welding is an automotive body shop, also called weld shop. This is where various units of a car body are welded together to form a shell that begins to look like a car. This paper focuses on explaining the nature of welding load and process requirements of a weld shop, leading towards the design and development of a Microsoft Excel based tool for optimal sizing of high current busway distribution system for resistance spot welding machines. This tool can be effectively used as a desktop application for efficient design development and comprehension of various design criteria. Besides, numerical based calculations have been provided with sound reasoning, progressively developing the proposed design criteria.