Sustainable energy efficiency for mig welding process

Abstract

Sustainable manufacturing emphasizes on the needs of an energy efficient process that optimise energy consumptions. Reduction in electrical energy consumption will diminish the carbon emission in generating electricity at the power plant. Welding is one of the most important joining technologies in manufacturing. Metal Inert Gas Welding (MIG) / Metal Active Gas (MAG) is one of the popular welding processes. In welding, the process parameters were not set to optimise electrical energy consumption for overall procedure. In this research, an optimized electrical energy consumption in welding process was determined. This was based on the optimised welding parameter model. The electrical energy consumed were summarised in a single energy map. This model produces good quality and energy efficient welding process. With reference to the design of experiments by Taguchi technique, three parameters which include the current, voltage and wire feed rate were varied to obtain an optimum energy efficient process and good quality of welding. The electrical energy consumed during the process were calculated and recorded. The data were used to obtain an optimised electrical energy consumption based on different welding parameters. The optimized welding parameters were used to develop a suitable welding parameters model which optimised the electrical energy consumption for the welding process. The reduction of electrical energy consumption benefits the industries in having to reduce the overall cost of welding process.