A NEW ROBOTIC PROCESS FOR IN SITU HEAT TREATMENT ON LARGE STEEL COMPONENTS

To avoid dismantling very large equipment while ensuring high!quality repair, a new robotic process is devel oped for local post weld heat treatment in situ. The temperature around the area repaired is controlled using a coil!type portable induction heating source . By using a high!frequency parallel resonant converter, the sys tem can be made portable enough to be installed on a compact manipulator. A method using finite element analysis is proposed to generate heating paths over complex shapes that keep temperature uniform in the volume treated.