Page 48: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2022)

TECH FEATURE WELDING

ESAB Innovation Makes Shipyard

Welding More Ef? cient, Accurate

Jeff Chittim, ESAB’s North American Senior Product Manager for Heavy

Industrial Products, discusses how WeldCloud online applications and the ESAB Heavy Industrial Product Line are a powerful tandem to help shipyards improve weld quality and ef? ciency.

By Greg Trauthwein hile automation has gone melds the heavy metal tooling with “In- tenance and calibration schedules. a long way in making dustry 4.0”, using IoT and data to moni- • WeldCloud Notes: Designed for shipyards more ef? - tor, measure, report and ultimately, im- Quality Control Managers as it aims to cient, today shipbuilding prove performance. improve welding documentation by digi-

W remains a hands-on endeavor, with a tizing and automating manual processes. dearth of ‘welders and ? tters’ being a “Overall, with the real-time data read-

Welcome to WeldCloud common lament. “WeldCloud is an online application out, you can access this data right from

Technology companies such as for weld data management. And when the welding machine,” said Chittim.

ESAB, a global supplier of welding and we talk about weld data, there’s the arc “But you can also access the data from cutting solutions across industries, aim on times for the operators, the welding your laptop, your tablet or your cell to help in supplying solutions that not parameters, so monitoring your amps phone applications. You can get a feel only make it easier to train new em- and volts. There’s also the wire depo- of where certain operators are at; you ployees to deliver quality welds, but sition rates, wire consumed per part,” can get a feel if your automated piece of supply the welding and cutting machine said Chittim. equipment is operating properly.” intelligence and insight monitor real- The WeldCloud suite is designed to “If you see one of the operators is time performance. enables users to improve overall opera- running at a very high input, maybe “One of the biggest drivers for the tional ef? ciency by monitoring, captur- he’s having some wire feed issues,” said welding equipment industry current- ing, tracking and analyzing data to make Chittim. The monitoring intel works ly is advancing technologies,” said intelligent decisions based on accurate the same on automated pieces of equip-

Jeff Chittim, North American Senior information. WeldCloud-enabled ma- ment, and if an anomaly is found “you

Product Manager for Heavy Industrial chines feature an embedded communi- can get in touch with the plant manager

Products, ESAB, noting that there are cation module that digitally connects the and say ‘Torch number two has a very two sides to the advancing technol- machine to WeldCloud via WiFi. high amperage. Let’s go check out the ogy discussion. “We see the need for ESAB offers three WeldCloud solutions: wire conduits. Maybe it’s having a little advancing technologies to improve the • WeldCloud Productivity: De- bit of trouble feeding wire and the am- operations for the welding, the operator signed for operation and production perages are a little out of whack.” themselves, as we know that the indus- managers, tracking information gen- WeldCloud uses the Microsoft Azure try is in dire need of more skilled trades erated by the welding process: arc-on cloud computing platform to help en- workers. We see a need for improving time, number of weld sessions, wire use, sure it is reliable and secure. Designed technologies while simplifying the use deposition rate and many other metrics. for ease of use, WeldCloud does not re- of those technologies, so it’s not weeks • WeldCloud Fleet: A service or quire a sophisticated IT department and or months of training that they need to maintenance manager’s new digital as- is scalable.

be able to operate it.” sistant designed to manage a ? eet of While WeldCloud helps to monitor

On the ? ip side is documentation of welding equipment across one or mul- both human and automated equipment the weld process to con? rm the ef? - tiple locations, with event and service to ensure proper functionality and ef? - ciency of the job and the quality of the logs, as well as real-time alerts. Weld- ciency, it’s a powerful business tool ? nished product. This is where ESAB Cloud Fleet also reminds them of main- “Everything is recorded, so you can 48 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • April 2022

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