Car Automatic Projection Welding Station for Galvanized Nuts

Introduction to the Galvanized Nut Automatic Projection Welding Workstation Project

Customer Background and Pain Points

Chengdu HX Company needed to weld M8 galvanized flange nuts on new stamping parts for VOLVO’s new car model. They required a welding penetration depth greater than 0.2mm without damaging the threads. However, their existing welding equipment faced the following issues:

Unstable weld strength: The old equipment, being a medium-frequency welding machine, resulted in unstable welding of nuts, leading to inconsistent quality and a high rejection rate.

Inadequate welding penetration: Due to unstable pressure and the need to accommodate a certain range of nuts, the actual welding process often failed to achieve the required penetration depth, or the cylinder’s follow-up performance deteriorated.

Excessive welding splatter and burrs, severe thread damage: The old equipment generated large sparks and excessive burrs during welding, resulting in severe thread damage and requiring manual thread cutting, leading to a high scrap rate.

Large investment required, need to purchase foreign equipment: Volvo’s audit required fully automatic welding of nuts with closed-loop control and traceable parameter recording. Domestic manufacturers’ samples could not meet these requirements.

These issues caused significant headaches for the customer, who was actively seeking solutions.

High Customer Requirements for Equipment

Based on the product characteristics and past experience, the customer, along with our sales engineers, discussed and established the following requirements for the new custom equipment:

Meet the requirement of 0.2mm welding penetration depth.

No deformation, damage, or welding slag sticking to the threads after welding, eliminating the need for thread cutting.

Equipment cycle time: 7 seconds per cycle.

Address workpiece fixation and safety issues by using robotic grippers and adding anti-splatter features.

Improve yield rate by incorporating a quality management system into the existing equipment to ensure a welding pass rate of 99.99%.

Given the customer’s requirements, conventional projection welding machines and design approaches were inadequate. What to do?

Development of Customized Galvanized Nut Automatic Projection Welding Workstation

Taking into account the customer’s requirements, the company’s R&D department, welding technology department, and sales department jointly held a new project development meeting. They discussed processes, fixtures, structures, positioning methods, configurations, identified key risk points, and developed solutions for each, determining the basic direction and technical details as follows:

Equipment Selection: Considering the customer’s process requirements, welding engineers and R&D engineers decided to use the ADB-360 heavy-duty medium-frequency inverter DC welding machine model.

Advantages of the Overall Equipment:

Automatic Compensation Function: The equipment features automatic compensation for grid voltage and current to ensure stable welding quantity and quality.

Safety Protection Function: The equipment is equipped with overload self-protection function, ensuring program integrity and detailed alarm function to ensure safe operation.

Intelligent Control System: It adopts a touch screen frequency conversion welding controller, supports multiple sets of welding parameter storage, and enhances operational flexibility.

Stability and Reliability: The equipment has a reasonable structure, easy maintenance, welding process monitoring function to ensure welding parameters meet standards, and data traceability.

Multi-function Welding Control: It has welding program password lock function and screw/nut detection function to ensure welding quality.

Convenient Operation: Equipped with pneumatic pressure adjustment function, easy operation, and closing height meets production needs, improving operation convenience.

Automatic Compensation Function: The welding machine has automatic compensation function after grinding, improving welding accuracy, and is integrated on the external main control screen for safe and reliable operation.

Efficient Production: The equipment has cylinder retreat and sales function, flexible operation, and high production efficiency.

After thoroughly discussing the technical solutions and details with the customer, both parties reached an agreement and signed a “Technical Agreement” as the standard for equipment development, design, manufacturing, and acceptance. On July 13, 2024, an order agreement was reached with Chengdu HX Company.

Quick Design, On-time Delivery, Professional After-sales Service, Received Customer Praise!

After determining the equipment technical agreement and signing the contract, the 50-day delivery period was indeed tight. AGERA’s project manager promptly held a production project kickoff meeting, determined mechanical design, electrical design, mechanical processing, outsourced parts, assembly, commissioning time nodes, customer factory pre-acceptance, rectification, final inspection, and delivery time, and organized and followed up on various departmental work processes through the ERP system.

Fifty days passed quickly, and the custom Galvanized Nut Automatic Projection Welding Workstation for Chengdu HX was finally completed. Our professional technical service personnel spent 10 days installing, debugging, and providing technical and operational training at the customer site. The equipment was successfully put into production and met all of the customer’s acceptance criteria. The customer was very satisfied with the actual production and welding results of the Galvanized Nut Automatic Projection Welding Workstation. It helped improve their production efficiency, solved the yield rate issue, saved labor costs, and received their praise!