History of welding

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The history of welding describes the path from the beginnings to the welding processes used today in craft and industry for joining metals , glasses and plastics of various dimensions. It began with the Sumerians and Hittites in the 3rd millennium BC. The development made little progress over millennia, only to experience a rapid acceleration with the inventions of the 19th century.

Fire and hammer welding

The fire and hammer welding of iron was v since the 15th century. Exercised in Asia Minor . These were the processes that were still available for joining metallic materials in the centuries to come. Exclusively by forge welding were from the Iron Age to the 20th century by the blacksmith next z. B. tools , agricultural implements and grids and weapons are welded (and then forged ), such as daggers and swords made of Damascus steel . The elementary process of forging out the sponge iron ( lobes ) and subsequent fermentation (cleaning the iron) could only be carried out by folding it several times and then welding it by fire.

The German word “welding” comes from the Old High German sueizan (= “to make hot”, “to heat”) and is the equivalent of the old Norse word sviða. It was used by blacksmiths between 800 and 1000 AD. The Russian word сва́рка ( svarka ; dt. Welding) certainly comes from the same source.

Gas fusion welding

The discovery of acetylene in 1836 by Edmund Davy and the liquefaction of air by Carl von Linde in 1895 made fusion welding possible using a high-energy flame in conjunction with oxygen. Henry Le Chatelier demonstrated experimentally that temperatures of over 3000 ° C can be reached with an oxygen-acetylene flame, approx. 500 ° C more than with a hydrogen-oxygen flame. When the welding torch for the oxygen-acetylene flame was invented by Charles Picard and Edmond Fouché, the time of gas fusion welding began , initially known as autogenous welding.

In Germany belonged the chemical factory Griesheim-Elektron and Drägerwerk Lübeck, Heinr. & Bernh. Dräger to the companies that developed gas fusion welding. In the Drägerwerk it was Bernhard Dräger who in 1900/01 developed the "Dräger oxyhydrogen welding torch" from his coal gas torch invented around 1896. In 1903, Bernhard Dräger came into contact with Ernst Wiss from the Griesheim-Elektron chemical factory, which resulted in a cooperation in the field of welding technology. Dräger and Wiss founded a working group for experiments in the field of autogenous metalworking, which in 1904, Hermann Richter from the Hamburg State Technical College, joined another person who has made outstanding contributions to the development of welding and cutting technology.

Arc welding

Welding with stick electrodes

After the discovery of the electric arc and the industrial generation of electric current, fusion welding with the arc became possible. Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Benardos and Stanisław Olszewski used the arc between two carbon electrodes.

In 1891, Nikolai Gavrilowitsch Slawjanow replaced the carbon electrodes that had been used up until then for arc welding with a metal rod that was both an arc carrier and a welding filler. Since the first stick electrodes were not covered, the welding point was not protected from oxidation. Therefore, these electrodes were difficult to weld.

In 1907, Oscar Kjellberg had the idea of ​​providing the metallic stick electrodes with a coating that served to improve the arc properties and to protect the weld pool from oxidation by atmospheric oxygen. Developments of the most varied of electrode covers followed to improve the arc stability and the metallurgical properties of the weld metal. The manual metal arc welding with covered electrodes became the standard welding processes.

TIG welding

While looking for a welding process to join the highly flammable magnesium and its alloys, Russel Meredith of Northrop Aircraft invented a welding process with a tungsten electrode and the protective gas helium . He called the process Heliarc. Because of the name tungsten for the electrode material and the use of an inert gas, it was called TIG welding (tungsten inert gas welding). The official English term is Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) according to the American Welding Society (AWS). In the period that followed, many improvements were made to the burner (water cooling, protective gas nozzles) and the composition of the electrodes, and the power sources were further developed. Superimposing a so-called high frequency voltage on the welding voltage was an especially important step in welding aluminum with alternating current.

Metal arc welding

Development of the welding process

In 1935 a patent was filed in Great Britain under the title Improvements in Electric Arc Welding , which describes the feeding of a wire electrode from a spool by a feed motor. This is the prerequisite for gas-shielded metal arc welding, which was first used in the USA in 1948 and Perry J. Rieppel applied for a patent. In the patent, the inert gases argon and helium as well as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are mentioned as protective gases . Rieppel calls the process shielded arc welding , the variant with inert gases was later also referred to as SIGMA welding ( shielded inert gas metal arc ). The disadvantages of the active gases, such as the toxic effect and flammability of CO and the burn-off of alloying elements in the material, are not addressed in the patent.

In the early 1950s, the Soviet engineers KV Liubavskii and NM Novozhilov examined in detail the metallurgical reactions during welding under CO 2 protection. This led to the development of special wires with appropriate alloy properties that compensate for the burn-off. This made the so-called CO 2 or MAG welding (metal active gas welding) possible with sufficient quality.

The development of special power sources with adjustments to the requirements of MIG / MAG welding followed. With the advent of electronically controlled power sources, it became possible to specifically control the melting process. The aim of these developments was to control the material transfer using current pulses, to keep the heat input into the workpiece as low as possible, or to increase the deposition rate and thus productivity.

Impulse welding

The material transition in traditional MIG / MAG welding with the short arc was uneven. In order to be able to control the detachment of the molten drop from the fed wire in a targeted manner, so-called impulse welding was introduced. Constantly repeating current pulses should ensure that a drop is detached with each increase in current. At the beginning of this technology, two power sources were used, later a controllable power source took over this task.

Reduction of the energy input

In Austria, CMT welding ( cold metal transfer ) was developed for series production by 2005 , in which the welding current is pulsed and filler wire is moved back and forth at a high frequency in order to achieve targeted droplet detachment with little heat input.

The same goal of reducing the heat input is achieved by the so-called ColdArc process , which was also launched on the market in 2005. All process interventions take effect directly from the power source with a constant wire feed and with the use of conventional welding torches.

Increase in the deposition rate

JG Church and H. Imaizumi investigated the extent to which the deposition rate of inert gas welding with consumable wire can be increased without loss of quality by using special gas mixtures. The TIME process ( Transferred Ionized Molten Energy ) and the variants derived from it were developed on the basis of their results .

Narrow gap welding

By using different equipment components, the welding processes can be optimally adapted to the respective tasks. For example, if you want to weld particularly thick sheets, you usually need to prepare a seam in the form of a V-joint. With the help of the narrow gap technique, the effort for the seam preparation can be reduced considerably. Sheets up to 300 mm thick can be welded with almost parallel flanks. The greatly reduced opening angle means that there is no need for time-consuming seam preparation, and the filler material and the amount of shielding gas can be reduced. In addition, significantly fewer welding beads are required, which also reduces the welding time. This means that the component is exposed to less heat and distortion is kept to a minimum. The rotating contact tube makes it possible to weld oscillating weld layers as well as string beads. The narrow gap sword is guided over the arc sensor in the middle of the joint. The sword, which is water-cooled down to the gas nozzle, allows uninterrupted welding times for several hours.

Arc stud welding

The first tests were carried out by Harold Martin in England between 1915 and 1918 and a patent was applied for in 1920. According to the description of the invention, an electric arc is ignited between a metal plate and a bolt. This is held for an adjustable time. At the end of the process, the bolt is immersed in the melt by mechanical, pneumatic or electrical force.

In the early 1940s, a welder named Ted Nelson came up with the idea of ​​simplifying bolted connections for attaching wood planks to steel plates. He replaced the previously usual fillet weld welding by melting the threaded bolt directly with an electric arc and dipping it into the weld pool through a device. In order to raise the bolt at a constant speed for arc ignition and to ensure a constant arc length, he developed a device with a suitable chuck and an electromagnet to lift the bolt. The welding time was set via a timer.

In 1970, the technical committee of the German Association for Welding Technology e. V. founded the "Stud Welding" working group.

Welding with a magnetically moved arc

In 1942, JW DAWSON applied for a patent in the USA that describes the principle of butt welding with an arc rotating in a radial magnetic field as a heat source. The process was developed and used industrially in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the Soviet Union, and in the 1970s also in Germany. Instead of butt welding using a rotating arc, fusion welding with a ring-shaped auxiliary electrode was used.

Today it is referred to as MBP welding (pressure welding with magnetically moving arc).

Resistance welding

In 1766 J. Beckmann reported on an attempt by Johan Carl Wilcke to weld flint balls together by discharging a capacitor , and as early as 1782 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg welded a clock spring with a knife blade using "artificial electricity".

Resistance welding was shown as a possible method of joining metals by James Prescott Joule in 1857 . Elihu Thomson undertook the decisive attempts to invent resistance welding around 1877. In 1886, he registered two patents for butt welding of metal wires.

Henry FA Kleinsschmidt used copper electrodes for resistance welding around 1897. This marked the beginning of the industrial breakthrough in resistance welding. He also had the idea of ​​using weld bumps when resistance welding tabs on rails. The resistance projection and roller seam welding method was developed around 1910. From 1930 on, resistance welding became widely accepted in industry. So were z. B. the internal structures of electron tubes (brackets and connections of the electrodes and the cathode heater) spot welded - soldering is out of the question because of the outgassing of flux residues.

Associations

National and international cooperation in training, certification, standardization and technical-scientific development in the field of welding and joining technology is coordinated in Germany by DVS , in Europe by EWF and worldwide by IIW .

literature

  • Helmut Behnisch, Günter Aichele: Welding technology through the ages: from forge fire to laser beam . DVS, Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-87155-794-3 .
  • Andre A. Odermatt: Welding: A Journey to Explore Its Past . Hobart Institute, Troy, Ohio 2010, ISBN 978-1-936058-29-7 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedrich Cornelius: Spiritual History of the Early Period. Volume 1, Brill Archive, 1960, p. 132.
  2. ↑ G. Aichele: Welding and soldering for 5000 years - jewelry, utensils and weapons. DVS Virtual Museum of Joining Technology
  3. ↑ roemer-online : fire welding and damask forging
  4. ^ F. Schmitthenner: Short German dictionary. Junghans, Darmstadt 1837.
  5. ↑ Patent US821188 : Blowpipe. Published June 22, 1906 , inventor: C. Picard. ‌
  6. ^ Michael Kamp : Bernhard Dräger: Inventor, Entrepreneur, Citizen. 1870 to 1928. Wachholtz Verlag GmbH, 2017, ISBN 978-3-529-06369-5 , p. 170.
  7. ^ Michael Kamp: Bernhard Dräger: Inventor, Entrepreneur, Citizen. 1870 to 1928. Wachholtz Verlag GmbH, 2017, ISBN 978-3-529-06369-5 , p. 219 ff.
  8. ↑ Patent US363320 : Process of and apparatus for working metals by the direct application of the electric current. Published on May 17, 1887 , inventors: Nikołaj Benardos, Stanisław Olszewski. ‌
  9. ↑ Patent US948764 : ELECTRIC WELDING, BRAZING, SOLDERING OR .. Posted on February 8, 1910 , inventor: O. Kjellberg. ‌
  10. ↑ Patent US2274631 : Welding torch. Filed February 24, 1942 , published January 4, 1941 , applicant: Northrop Aircraft Inc, inventor: Russel Meredith. ‌
  11. ↑ Patent GB593536 : Improvements in and relating to welding. Published October 20, 1947 Applicant: THE LINDE AIR PRODUCTS COMPANY. ‌
  12. ↑ Patent GB452670 : Improvements in electric arc welding. Registered on August 27, 1936 , published April 1, 1935 , inventor: HM HENDERSON. ‌
  13. ↑ Patent US2497629 : Shielded arc welding. Applied on February 14, 1950 , published December 10, 1948 , applicant: AIR REDUCTION COMPANY, INC., Inventor: Perry J. Rieppel. ‌
  14. ↑ Любавский К. В., Новожилов Н. М .: Свaрка плавящимся электродом в среде защитных газов . Автогенное дело, № 1, 1953, pp. 4–8.
  15. ↑ patent GB1106684 : Improvements in Electric Arc Welding. Applied July 20, 1965 , published March 20, 1968 , applicant: The British Oxygen Company, inventor: P. Boughton. ‌
  16. ↑ Patent WO2006125234 : COLD METAL TRANSFER WELDING PROCESS AND WELDING INSTALLATION. Registered on May 24, 2005 , published on November 30, 2006 , applicant: FRONIUS INT. GMBH, inventor: M. Schörghuber. ‌
  17. ↑ S.-F. Goecke: Energy-reduced arc joining process for heat-sensitive materials ( memento of the original from November 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , EWM Hightec Welding GmbH , 2005 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ewm-group.com
  18. ↑ JG Church, H. Imaizumi: TIME process . IIW / IIS Doc. XII-1199-90, 1990
  19. ^ Gesellschaft für Schweisstechnik International mbH (2012): 22nd welding technology conference, November 7, 2012, Halle (Saale)
  20. ↑ Patent US1410421 : Electric Welding. Registered June 21, 1920 , published March 21, 1922 , inventors: LJ Steele, H. Martin, AE McCarthy. ‌
  21. ^ Charles C. Pease: Nelson "type" welding . CP Metallurgical, 2008.
  22. ↑ Patent USD143090S : Design for a stud welding machine. Published on 1945 , inventor: TED NELSON. ‌
  23. ↑ Patent US2286211 : ARC WELDING SYSTEM AND METHOD. Published June 16, 1942 , Applicant: Raytheon Manufacturing Company, Inventor: J. w. DAWSON. ‌
  24. ↑ Patent SU122560 : Способ сварки кольцевых швов, например, стыков труб. Published on November 10, 1958 , inventor: Н. Я. Кочановский, Е. С. Федер и С. М. Катлер. ‌
  25. ↑ Patent US347140 : Apparatus for Electric Welding. Published August 10, 1886 , inventor: E.THOMSON. ‌
  26. ↑ Patent US347141 : Apparatus for Electric Welding. Published August 10, 1886 , inventor: E.THOMSON. ‌
  27. ↑ Patent US616436 : Electric Welding. Published December 20, 1898 , inventor: Henry FA Kleinschmidt. ‌