Improving the lifetime of an automatic welding system

In an industrial development project an automatic welding system for multilayer steel plates is developed for mass production. The aluminium alloy rails of the system are subjected to wear-out failure. The purpose of this paper is to determine an optimal design such that the reliability (life) of the rails is improved. Seven control factors are considered likely to influence the lifetime of the rails. An orthogonal array is employed to analyse the data and to reach an optimal design. A comparison is made to verify that the optimal design is better than the current system.