A study on application of multi‐sensor information fusion in pulsed GTAW

Purpose – Welding sensor technology is the key technology in welding process, but a single sensor cannot acquire adequate information to describe welding status. This paper addresses arc sensor and sound sensor to acquire the voltage and sound information of pulsed gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) simultaneously, and uses multi‐sensor information fusion technology to fuse the information acquired by the two sensors. The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of multi‐sensor information fusion in pulsed GTAW. Design/methodology/approach – The weld voltage and weld sound information are first acquired by arc sensor and sound sensor, then the features of the two signals are extracted, and the features are fused by weighted mean method to predict the changes of arc length. The weights of each feature are determined by optional distribution method. Findings – The research findings show that multi‐sensor information fusion technology can effectively utilize the information of different sensors and get better result than single sensor. Originality/value – The arc sensor and sound sensor are first used at the same time to get information about pulsed GTAW and the fusion result shows its advantages over single sensor; this reveals that multi‐sensor fusion technology is a valuable research area in welding process.