Design and Construction of Virtual Welding Training System for the Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW)

In practical welding processes, special requirements are needed. Welding metals, electrodes, welding machine and fume suction machine…etc are needed to train welders. The present work suggests building a soft or virtual training laboratory that can simulate most of the conditions of practical welding processes. In last two decades, several patents registered around the world in the virtual welding machine and during the last three years the first and the second international virtual welding conferences occurred in Germany. The current study allows the operator to simulate and experience most of the conditions found in welding. It teaches the hand-eye coordination skills necessary in welding, provides immediate feedback so the trainee knows if the arc length effect, welding angles, or the correct travel speed, welding electrode burn-off, and records all mistakes, which lead in general to minimize the training cost and reducing the training period. In the current project, a training of welders for Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW) can be performed close to reality. To keep the information about the experiments on virtual welding simulator and the users who performed the experiments, a database management and reporting system has been built. With this software the results can be shown as graphics and scoring. Low cost sensors are used in design and construct the current Virtual Welding System. Ultrasound, infrared, optical rotary encoder, linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors are used. The constructed virtual welding system consists from a major virtual view system (Helmet and 22" LCD touch screen) and virtual tools system (Welding Gun & coupons) in additional to PC and several types of converters. The converters consist of analog to digital converter (ADC) and Video Graphics Array (VGA) converters in addition to several electrical conductors to change the power supply sources depending upon the software control. The Helmet is developed to be more compatible with virtual welding and real welding, so that the main shape of the helmet is stilled same as real prototype while the polarized screen replaced with 8" DVD screen and AV camera. When the virtual welding process occur the Helmet DVD screen will receive data from PC (Virtual Welding Process) while when the process stop the Helmet DVD screen will receive data from AV Camera to represent the real environment. Six virtual welding case studies are studied; these case studies covered most welding positions in the Shielded Metal Arc Welding. Flat plate, flat groove and Tee sections are studied for horizontal, vertical and overhead positions. Effects of the arc length, travel speed and welding angles are studied. The given results are good accepted and the trainees became more able to deal with real welding.