Organization Name: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Project introduction:

Resistance spot welding (RSW) is a key process for the manufacture of thin-walled structuresfor automobiles and subway trains, and its core equipment "weld controller" is the brain that determines the quality of welding. However, in automation applications, the share of domesticRSW  products is less than 5%, and the market is basically monopolized by the United States, Germany and Japan. In order to ensureweld quality in mass production, domestic and foreign manufacturers generally rely on non-realtime control methods called "post-welding manual sampling + offline process adjustment".It is low efficiency and high cost, seriously restricting the intelligent transformation and upgrading of the industry, which provides an opportunity for China's RSW products to overtake the curve.

After 15 years of collaborative research between industry, academia, research and application, the project team pioneersthe in-situ MHDcontrol and multi-sensor virtualmetrologytechnology to achieve "online inspection + real-time control" of RSW quality, with the support of Shanghai Key Laboratory and Shanghai Intelligent Manufacturing Function Platform.

The Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society has appraised the technology as "reaching leading international level", and the key indexes have comprehensively exceeded similar foreign systems.The team has obtained 16 authorized invention patents, 2017 GM Global Operational Excellence Award, 2018 Shanghai Science and Technology Progress First Prize, 2019 Railway Transportation Science and Technology Progress Award and 2020 China Railways Science and Technology Award. The technology products have been used in the mass production lines of the world's top 500 enterprises, such as CRRC Group and SAIC Group, and have been applied to the manufacture of more than 2,000 subways and 3 million cars in China and exported to the "Belt and Road" member countries. The new products effectively improve quality, reduce cost and increase efficiency, which has laid a good foundation for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements.