Producers of electric resistance welded tube by and large love uniformity—perfect roundness, perfect shapes, the kind of predictability that keeps customers happy and quality control departments bored.

That ain’t the real world, though. In fact, for Lock Joint Tube, variability is the rule on two fronts.

First, one very important metric—pressure in the weld zone—is vitally important to ensuring weld and tube quality, but historically it’s been quite difficult to measure accurately.

Second, Lock Joint Tube doesn’t like to do uniform. The South Bend, Ind., tube maker takes special pride in quite the opposite.

“We specialize in weird,” said Bill Ringbauer, corporate NDT manager for Lock Joint Tube. “We can take some of those hard designs—octagons, Ws, ovals, grand ovals where it’s flat on one side and oval on the other—and manufacture that. We’re very good at it.”

With all those chances for things to go wrong, when it came time to replace the obsolete weld monitoring system that Lock Joint Tube had been using for several years, the company needed a system that reliably determines with an inline tool that all of its mills are in fact achieving fully fused welds. The solution the company chose to install on all its mills is a WI-3000 vision system from Xiris Automation.

The unit on each mill projects a laser line over the weld zone of the tube. A camera looks at the laser line and transmits the image to a monitor. What the operator sees looks like a cross-section of the tube viewed from the end, as if looking into a spyglass. Triangulating from those images, the software locates the tube and calculates a radial component from which it determines what the complete circle should look like.

From that, the system’s software determines where an anomaly in the OD’s height occurs, which is the tube’s weld bead.

But let’s back up a bit.

Stabilizing the Process

Whether producing an array of tubing shapes and sizes like Lock Joint Tube does or running miles of fence posts, tube makers benefit from knowing what’s going wrong before it creates scrap. That’s what the WI-3000 is designed to do: identify anomalies early so scrap and its monetary costs become nonissues.

“People talk about quality, detecting defects, and just making sure you don’t ship something bad out the door, whereas this technology is a little bit further upstream,” Xiris Sales Manager Cornelius Sawatzky said. “I typically say, let’s stabilize your process so that your final inspection equipment never finds anything that’s not conforming—process monitoring as a way of stabilizing your process.”

At Lock Joint Tube’s South Bend facility, one bedeviling puzzle has been the ability, or rather inability, to accurately measure the pressure on the strip edges as they’re pressed together by the forming rolls at the weld box. With this laser-guided system, the company can calculate that pressure much more precisely, far enough from the heat of the weld box to preserve the laser and camera and perform the necessary measurements repeatably within a punishing production environment.

“ERW is basically a high-tech form of blacksmithing,” Ringbauer said. “We’re measuring the expulsion, the width, the height, and things like that in order to guarantee that we have the correct pressure.

“One of the main problems that you have with any ERW system is that electronics don’t like extreme temperatures. When the two strips come together, we haven’t been able to find a way to measure the amount of pressure we’re putting on it, so everything’s done by feel. What this system allows us to do is actually get a measurement of bead height, width, and angle that tells us what our expulsion is, and then we do some other processes to guarantee that that information is correct and that we’re getting a fully fused weld.”

Working backwards from those measurements gives mill operators a baseline that they can feed into the monitoring system. That helps them set up the mill for the next run and the next using the parameters that created a fully fused weld on that particular mill the first time.

Of course, there’s always room for error on a tube mill, Ringbauer said, but it’s a matter of a few thousandths of an inch.

“Once we start running, generally, it is very close if we have done our due diligence on setting up the mill,” he said.

Integrating the New System

When Lock Joint Tube was deciding what new system to purchase, Ringbauer wasn’t shy with Sawatzky about his intentions: He was going to abuse it so badly, it was not going to survive. Not because he hates machines, but simply to make sure it could endure what the mills were going to dish out.

“I ran it for 21 days, and I didn’t even clean it,” Ringbauer recalled with a grin.

Because every tube mill is unique in its quirks and tendencies, part of Ringbauer’s initiation process was to do the necessary engineering work to make sure it produced good results on every mill. At the end, “all in all, the system did exactly what we wanted it to do,” he said.

Sawatzky said Xiris has put a lot of effort into making sure its equipment can perform in harsh environments. For example, it puts all of its systems’ sensor heads through a vacuum test to make sure they’re properly sealed not only from heat but also from the steam billowing continuously from the weld seam.

In addition to its construction, the integrity of the unit is aided by its physical location on the mill—on the backside of the weld box, before the scarfing station, about 3 in. above the tube running underneath.

“You’ve got a gap to afford the ability to evacuate any of the steam that might be there, but you also have less of a probably of having a mechanical impact between the sensor and the tube traveling through,” Sawatzky said.

The system Lock Joint Tube replaced with the WI-3000 was finicky. Programming was difficult, and if an error crashed the system, Ringbauer (or one of his team) had to go back and re-enter all the new programming that he entered before the production run. This new system shows an operator the last thing he did, right there on a screen at the mill, so even if it does crash, booting back up takes far less time than before.

Ringbauer was mum about production numbers and specific productivity improvements on the mills but did note that the system has done exactly what he and his team wanted it to do.

“It has significantly increased our ability to monitor the process as we’re rolling,” Ringbauer said. “With the other system, it was tedious.”

Tracking and Using Data

One other thing the new system has improved for Lock Joint Tube is tracking and recording data—yes, the kind that has helped the company establish recipes for good tube, but also for improvements beyond that.

“We worked with them on some of the data arching so that if they need to go back and do some secondary evaluations of something that might have happened, they do have some data to go and do that. Because let’s face it, production is all about data nowadays.”

The WI-3000 has been on the market for about 10 years, but it’s new to Lock Joint Tube. So, integrating the systems into each of the facility’s tube mills is a work in progress. The company’s advantage is having a team of seasoned mill operators who know the personality traits of their machines and can make even better use of the data it tracks and records than newbies with no historic knowledge.

“Each machine has its own idiosyncrasies,” Ringbauer said. “Then you get an artist like a mill operator, who has been doing it for long enough that it’s just a feel. They truly are artists when it comes to doing the work. Yeah, they’re going in there and setting it up, in theory reading the instructions. That’s great, but it doesn’t actually tell you, ‘Why is that squeaking?’ That’s where the mill operator comes into play—the one who really is the brain behind the machine.”

That hasn’t made setting up the Xiris units a cake walk, but the new system is a vast improvement nonetheless, according to Ringbauer.

“Integration is a continuous process,” Ringbauer said. “There’s no one piece of equipment that does everything. The ability to communicate with all the other pieces of equipment, to be able to get the data out, to be able to actually utilize that data, it’s great. My mill operators can see what it looks like, but the real quality and continuous improvement comes from tracking of the data.

“It does everything that we would ever want it to do, but how we utilize it is personal to us because every mill has its own footprint. We have the ability to customize the Xiris system based on the data that we’ve pulled. We have verified that the data that’s coming out of it is accurate. And we’re not talking, you know, apples to green apples. We’re talking apples to apples. It’s very, very close.”

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