MULTI RESPONSE OPTIMIZATION OF GAS METAL ARC WELDING PROCESS PARAMETERS

Abstract

In this competitive world, the customers perceive the most reliable, high quality with low cost product. In
order to satisfy the customers demand, the manufacturing industries are being forced to continuously
optimize their process parameters. Gas Metal Arc Welding famously abbreviated GMAW, is one of the
most important metal joining process done on mild steel. The selection of improper GMAW process
parameters increases the power consumption, material consumption, man power and cost of the product.
So that the optimization of GMAW process parameters is most important to produce effective products. In
spite of very high costing techniques, Taguchi method with grey relational analysis is used to reduce
more number of unwanted iterations, money and time. In this work the parameters such as, i) Welding
current, ii) voltage, iii) welding speed are selected and setting into three levels for each parameters. Here
L9 orthogonal array is selected to do the analysis. L9 orthogonal array assist to determine, how many
trials are necessary and levels of each parameter in every trial. Bead width and bead height are
optimized based on signal to noise ratio. Optimum parameters are identified by grey relational grades
and significant factors are also obtained by ANOVA. Observations of this study may be used in
fabrication of shipbuilding, automotive sub-assemblies and pressure vessels.