A new model to distinguish welds performed by short-circuit GMAW based on FRESH algorithm and MLP ANN

The short-circuit gas metal arc welding has been continuously studied over the years, due to its important role in manufacturing processes. Concerning the process, many kinds of research are carried out aiming to understand the influence of the shielding gas in welds quality. In this context, this work treats the voltage and current welding signals as time series and applies a feature extraction based on scalable hypothesis tests, which is called FRESH algorithm, in order to obtain the signal features. After that, these features are applied in a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network, trained by the scaled conjugate gradient method, which classifies the welds according to the flow rate and type of shielding gas used in the process. The model presented excellent performance, which shows that the proposal is suitable to be used in welding quality monitoring.