Improving the lifetime of an automatic welding system

In an industrial development project an automatic welding system for multil ayer steel plates is developed for mass production. The aluminium alloy rai ls of the system are subjected to wear-out failure. The purpose of this pap er is to determine an optimal design such that the reliability (life) of th e rails is improved. Seven control factors are considered likely to influen ce the lifetime of the rails. An L-8(2(7)) orthogonal array is employed to analyse the data and to reach an optimal design. A comparison is made to ve rify that the optimal design is better than the current system. Copyright ( C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.