Heat Transfer Effect on a Laser Robotic End of Arm Tooling During Manufacturing Proces

Laser welding functionality has been greatly expanded with robotic assistance and have immediately attracted the automotive industry corporations' interests for bringing down the production costs and delivering higher-quality items. Pressure wheel assembly is used in the robot laser welding process to apply force and control the guidance of the focus position on the work piece. Pressure on the gap ahead of the weld in between surfaces is a control factor for a high quality weld that could be obtained by using a wheel force control. One of the failure modes experienced by the pressure wheel is the thermal damage. Thus, the cause of failure must be included in the design factors and features of the wheel.;This study addresses different design methods and models of a pressure wheel and the corresponding numerical simulations are performed in order to investigate the effects of various geometrical parameters on the thermal performance. These geometrical parameters include the shape, distribution of heat dissipation, and material properties. Experimental tests are linked with a CFD modelling method in order to provide reliability and trust to the model itself. Three different models are presented in this study: Design 1 is a solid thin disc wheel; Design 2 is a solid thin disc wheel with circular geometric holes; and Design 3 is a solid disc wheel with ventilated geometric holes.;The experimental results indicate that the ventilated wheel cools down faster with convection in the ventilated channels. A comparison among the three different designs show Design 3 (geometrical ventilated wheel) has the best cooling performance. The experiment measurements display that with design 3, the temperature drops from T initial =440 °F to 337°F in 50 seconds. The calculated results show that the temperature drops from T= 440 °F to 355.7 °F in 50 seconds using design 3. The variation in temperature from simulation between a full (plain) and geometrical ventilated disc in 50 seconds using the same material is about 12 degrees (K). Also it was demonstrated that there is an appreciable variation of temperature dropping among ceramic, stainless steel, and cast iron and tungsten materials. Data shows that tungsten is the preferred material and the temperature decreased in the course of time of 50 seconds to an average T = 301.19 °F .