Automotive Weldloop: Optimizing welding lines with software support 

Together with welding specialist Fronius, VITRONIC is launching its latest innovation Weldloop. The software solution helps vehicle manufacturers optimize their welding lines faster and reduce rejections. With Weldloop, inspection data and welding process data can be linked and displayed together for the first time. Thanks to the data correlations and special evaluation tools, the causes of defects can be identified and eliminated much faster than before. Weldloop is currently already being used by selected pilot customers, including a major automotive manufacturer.

Bodywork, axles, battery boxes for electric cars: safety always comes first when it comes to welds for such critical vehicle parts. No defective weld seam must leave production. But errors happen. Car manufacturers and suppliers therefore make immense efforts to inspect every single weld seam and improve the welding processes. 

At the same time, they have to pay attention to profitability, increase plant availability and output, and minimize rejections. Until now, these goals have been difficult to reconcile: That's because the tasks surrounding weld inspection and process optimization are largely performed manually. 

For this area, VITRONIC's Weldloop solution represents a real breakthrough. The prerequisite for its use is the VIRO WSI automatic inspection unit, which inspects each weld seam using 3D image processing and records the data. With the Weldloop software, inspection data from quality control can now be linked with data from the welding process.  

Engineers can use Weldloop to efficiently analyze large amounts of data and graphically display trends. This allows them to quickly identify deviations, as well as their possible causes and at which welding station they occurred. Without Weldloop, engineers would manually have to compare all the data and go through troubleshooting procedures. 

In this way, vehicle manufacturers can save significant costs. The downtimes of the welding lines are reduced. At the same time, they improve the quality of the welds and the inspection: this means fewer rejects and less effort for manual reworking. 

VITRONIC developed Weldloop in close cooperation with Austrian company Fronius, the global technology leader in robotic welding. The software was tested and further improved for months at selected pilot customers in the run-up to the market launch. A major automotive manufacturer is also already using Weldloop productively. Now Weldloop is available as a mature solution for all companies that use Fronius welding systems together with the Fronius data documentation solution WeldCube Premium. 

Weldloop is the gateway to automated process optimization for welding lines. Currently, the software merely links and analyzes the data. In the future, the welding line can be imagined as a "closed-loop system": It continuously evaluates data, optimizes itself and can intervene independently before errors occur.