Analytical & Metallurgical Services

For end-users who need to understand why welds have failed and how to prevent them from failing in the future, we offer a comprehensive analytical service combined with our metallurgical service. We examine all data, including destructive testing results and physical weld samples, for both good and bad welds.

WeldMS will perform the following metallurgical analyses for both failure assessments and materials selection:

• Mechanical testing including hardness, tensile, impact, and bending

• Metallographic examination, and microstructure analysis

• Optical microscopy and micro-hardness testing

• Scanning electron microscopy (SEM)

• Energy dispersive X-ray analysis (for chemical analysis)

The welding data can come from a WeldMS monitoring system or from a third party system as long as we can read the data. If the data is unreadable, we can temporarily retrofit our portable monitoring system to gather the required signals.

Once all the data is gathered, we perform an extensive analysis, comparing digital information about welding parameters with the results from our metallurgical findings and destructive testing of both good and bad welds.

We use a statistical model to process the data. The task is to identify correlations between welding data  (pressure, current, time, etc.) and the final properties of the weld, while minimizing error. The stronger the correlation, the clearer the pattern between welding data and good and bad welds. The clearer that pattern, the higher the predictability rate in identifying the good and bad welds.

This process is illustrated in the following diagram.