SME MR00-200

Arc light sensing is widely used in adaptive control of arc welding processes because of its simplicity. Current technologies have been developed primarily based on experiments. To gain insight into this method and improve its performance, this study focuses on the development of a theoretical model which correlates arc light radiation to welding parameters to improve the utilization of arc light sensing. To this end, the distributions of different radiant sources in the arc column have been studied as well. Experiments show that the welding arc light model fits the arc light sensing result. The proper spectral lines, instead of the overall intensity of the arc light radiation were selected to improve the arc light signal quality.