Submerged Arc Welding, SAW, is today one of the most productive welding methods for thick plates. Productivity in SAW is limited by the heat input in the welding process; each material can only withstand a certain amount of heat while keeping the mechanical properties post-welding. To compare productivity, a measure of how much material is added per active welding time is taken for a process: deposition rate, higher deposition rate means higher productivity of the process. Only Electroslag Welding can contribute with greater deposition rates but is limited due to the decrease in mechanical properties caused by the high energy input of the process.
By exploiting the synergy of SAW twin welding technology and adding a cold, non-conductive, electrode, the heat input can be reduced while simultaneously increasing productivity. ESAB has developed a technique to utilize this behavior to further increase productivity while retaining energy input. ESAB has chosen to call this technique Integrated Cold Electrode™, ICE™, and is the base of this project.
High productivity welding with thick plates has its main area of application in the energy sector, especially within wind, nuclear and oil, where welding often is the bottleneck of the production cycle. Other areas of application are in offshore, ship building and pressure vessels.
To meet the requirements set by the industry, high quality welds has to be achieved with increasing productivity. Today these industries either use X- or V-joints which requires a lot of material to be filled. Another solution is to use narrow gap joints, which require less material to be filled but where special equipment has to be used. Between these types of joints there is a gap, where the joints are not narrow, in the sense of practically vertical walls, but they are not either wide, as an X-joint. Joint geometry is highly influential on the productivity, the more material that needs to be filled, the greater time it takes to complete the product. Therefore the need of new equipment with the possibility to weld in these kinds of joints is to be developed.