A New Robotic Process for In Situ Heat Treatment on Large Steel Components

摘要

To avoid dismantling very large equipment while ensuring high-quality repair, a new robotic process is developed for local post weld heat treatment in situ. The temperature around the area repaired is controlled using a coil-type portable induction heating source. By using a high-frequency parallel resonant converter, the system can be made portable enough to be installed on a compact manipulator. A method using finite element analysis is proposed to generate heating paths over complex shapes that keep temperature uniform in the volume treated. A heat treatment performed on a 13Cr-4Ni stainless steel component demonstrates the precision of the robotic process.