Senior Project

[CRaSHnBuRN]

Since quite a few people in the club are in MMET, I thought I would make a thread about the senior project we've been working on. Some of you may have seen it in the Thompson Hall welding lab.

For the project Dr. Price wanted us to design and build a submerged arc welding (SAW) table for use in the Thompson Hall welding lab. Basically a solid consumable electrode is fed into into a pile of granular flux. The pile of flux protects the electrode and can be used to add alloying elements. The nice part about this process is since the arc is buried within the flux, there is no flash and therefore you do not have to wear a welding helmet to watch it. Most of the time this process is a automated one, with the welding system and hopper full of flux running above the work piece on a track system. SAW produces high quality welds and can weld up to 3 inch thick plate in a single pass. I've also included a couple of pictures below to help describe the SAW process.

The team consisted of four members, Clint Loggins, Brady Marsh, Adam Janac, and Chris Feller (me).

Some of you may know a few of the other members as well. Clint TA's some of the ENTC courses, and has been helping Greg build John Brown's rollcage. Brady is Will's (william_ace) roommate.

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Dr. Price specified that she wanted the table to be able to hold two plates up to 18" wide, 72" long, and 1.5" thick. Thats over 550 lbs a plate, so the table design needed to be very robust.

Because such high heats are involved, we wanted to make sure that the middle of the table was open in order to avoid the plate being welded to the table. We also decided to make the gap adjustable to help with fit up on large plates and to aid with setting up fixtures and jigs. Since the flux is granular, the weld surface needs to be flat, even if the joint is not (T-joints, etc.), so some sort of fixture will be needed.

Finally, the welder that will be used has not actually been purchased yet, and the preferred make and model may be changed, so that had to be taken into consideration since the specs for the welder and track system are different for each make and model

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so this is the design we came up with.

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the picture above is our first design. We have made some changes since then, such as a trough system to catch excess flux, as well as some other added details, but that picture doesn't want to upload for some reason

The table is divided into two main sections, the table tops (x2) and the substructure. The table tops run on a track system made of angle iron that is supported by the substructure. We had hoped by using the angle iron track system that it would help to keep the table aligned as well as prevent the buildup of contaminants that may hinder the opening of closing of the table. There are a total of 5 wheels per table top, each of which is rated to support 800 lbs.

The table tops are adjusted by use of a custom designed crank system made of 1" diameter acme rod. The rod is mounted to the the tables by use of threaded couplings, and is also connected to the substructure by use of a custom machined housing that allows the acme rod to rotate, but stay centrally positioned. This allows the table tops to move in equal amounts away or towards the central axis of the table and linear path of the welder

the table can also be leveled with the use of acme rod adjusters

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so after designing this thing, running tests on the it, and letting various profs and outside sources try to tear the design apart, we were given the okay to begin ordering parts. Construction began about 3 weeks ago

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week 2

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this week we finally completed the crank system, and attached it to the table as well as more bracing for the substructure and track system. The crank worked flawlessly, and even with the weight of 2 people on each of the two table tops, minimal force was needed to open or close the table. All that remains at this time is to cap off the bottom tubes, add the level adjusters, then finish welding everything together. As soon as I get the pictures from this week from Clint, I'll post them up

[BMFScout]

Kickass table!