Welding and Joining Technologies – Trends in the Automotive Industry
Supporting Planning, Simulation and Execution of Complex CarBody Lines
By Tal Vagman
Product Manager
Tecnomatix Technologies
Abstract
In my presentation, I will discuss the current and emerging trends of utilizing various welding and joining Technologies within the global Automotive industry. This will be shared from the unique point of view of Tecnomatix Technologies, a leading software company working with all major Carmakers around the world. I also will provide examples and use cases for the various ways in which our Automotive customers make use of Tecnomatix eMPower™ CarBody solution to help them design, model, simulate and optimize their Body in White assembly process. This will provide a real insight to methods, techniques and technologies used by the world’s largest manufacturers and key users of welding and joining technologies.
Over the years, from Tecnomatix’ innovative spirit the concept of the Digital Factory was born – overall manufacturing planning via digitization; in the late 1990’s Tecnomatix introduced groundwork for eMPower applications that would transform product designs into high quality manufacturing lines for mass production.
We define eMPower as an enterprise-wide computerized solution enabling manufacturers to plan, simulate and optimize a complete factory, including its production lines and processes, at all levels of detail. Today Tecnomatix supports almost all major Automotive manufacturers worldwide and provides them with a mature solution for their Carbody(Body In White) departments and plants.
The eMPower CarBody desktop environment facilitates collaborative planning and engineering, and enables users to create detailed and later optimized, virtual models of body-in-white manufacturing processes.
With such tools as standard robots, fixtures and various welding guns from the system’s libraries, our users can quickly plan a welding environment. Manufacturing engineers can define welding points and allocate them to welding operations. Automatic tools associate the most suitable combination of welding guns, controllers and transformers according to process parameters, such as sheet metal thickness and combination. This allows early evaluation of welding and joining operation times, costs and project investments, as well as assembly line performance, throughput and resource utilization.
eMPower™ CarBody also tracks and manages product design changes and verifies their effect on the welding processes. Tecnomatix CarBody engineering applications enable detailed design of robotic and manual operations in a welding/joining line and cell. Automatic robot placement ensures that the robots can reach their target without colliding with their environment. 3D simulations of the generated robot paths allow to detect collisions, check Reachability and optimize cycle time. We also support automatic generation of robot and programmable logic control (PLC) programs (off-line programming) for welding tasks based on the planning and simulation models representing the BiW Line.