Thick plate welding
More efficient welding – improving quality
Joining thick steel plates like those used to build ships and machines is one of the most complex and difficult welding tasks, and often large tolerance differences and gaps need to be compensated. All parts require careful preparation to ensure permanently stable connections. Also, the required result is often only achieved after several welding processes.
MAG (GMAW) welding in a multi-layer technique
Steel plates that are 10-15 mm thick are joined using the MAG arc welding process. Frequently, the time-consuming multi-layer technique is applied. Various procedures are combined to improve the quality of the welds in a highly efficient manner: the productive MAG welding with a higher melting rate is used for root and filler layers and in some cases for the entire weld. Other standard procedures applied to join thick plates include manual metal arc welding and submerged arc welding that is also suitable for filler covering layers.
Precise coordination of procedure and material
To guarantee both efficiency and quality during the time-consuming thick plate welding process, it is essential to select a welding process that is exactly suited the materials and torches that are used. Increasingly, new procedures, for instance hybrid techniques from GMAW and laser welding or optimised MAG tandem techniques, are used.