Detection of slag inclusions using infrared thermal imagining system

Abstract

Assuring high quality of welded joins is a vital task in many industrial branches also when joints are made manually. It is the case metal-arc welding with covered electrode. One of main imperfection, that can occur in this process is slag inclusion. In the paper an method for detection of slag inclusion in multipass manual welding is proposed and validated. The key idea of the method is that small temperature disturbances will be noticeable in consecutive cross-section of joint in the cooling pass. Temperature distribution weld face was measured with longwave infrared camera (LWIR). For consecutive cross-section made in IR representation of joint differences in mean temperature was calculated to assess the cooling rate directly after the elements were welded. It can be made because on each thermogram the whole joint is visible, thus position of electrode in time can be easily marked. Results of slag inclusion detection were compared with radiographic images of made joints. In the future additional studies will be performed in order to generalize proposed method to wider group of materials and for more complex welds.