Importance

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Abstract

A robotic welding method for making a heat exchanger having tubes and inlet and outlet headers is disclosed. The headers have planar tubesheets and covers. The planar tubesheets are welded to the inlet and outlet ends of tubes. The tubesheets have two co-linear edge portions and a third edge intersecting a line through the two co-linear edge portions. The tubesheet has interior edges defining holes through which the ends of tubes extend. A robotic welding system is provided, with a sensor, a welding apparatus and a controller for controlling the movement and operation of the welding apparatus. The tubesheet is scanned to find the first and second co-linear edge portions, the third intersecting edge portion, and the face of the tubesheet. An actual origin is defined at the intersection of a first line through the first two co-linear edge portions found through scanning and a second line perpendicular to the line through the co-linear edge portions and extending through the third intersecting edge portion found through scanning and lying on the plane of the tubesheet face. The welding apparatus is moved to weld the tubesheet and tubes together. The positions of the welds are based upon the location of the actual origin of the tubesheet relative to the robotic system. After the tubesheet has been welded to the tube ends, the cover is welded to the tubesheet. The robotic welding system uses the same coordinate system that it has defined and performs additional scans of the cover to determine two points on each of the side faces of the cover and one point and each of the cover's end faces. The welding apparatus then welds the cover to the tubesheet along the edges of the cover faces.

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First Claim