Next Article in Journal
Suitability of Eroded Particles from Die-Sink Electro Discharge Machining for Additive Manufacturing—Review, Characterization and Processing
Previous Article in Journal
Direct Production of Ni–Co–Mn Mixtures for Cathode Precursors from Cobalt-Rich Lithium-Ion Battery Leachates by Solvent Extraction
 
 
Article
Peer-Review Record

Online Detection of Keyhole Status in a Laser-MIG Hybrid Welding Process

Metals 2022, 12(9), 1446; https://doi.org/10.3390/met12091446
by Xi’an Fan, Xiangdong Gao *, Yuhui Huang and Yanxi Zhang
Reviewer 1: Anonymous
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3:
Metals 2022, 12(9), 1446; https://doi.org/10.3390/met12091446
Submission received: 30 July 2022 / Revised: 27 August 2022 / Accepted: 28 August 2022 / Published: 30 August 2022
(This article belongs to the Section Welding and Joining)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the present study, austenitic stainless steel was adopted as an experimental object, and a dual high-speed camera system was used to obtain real-time images of droplet transfer, keyhole and molten pool in laser-MIG hybrid welding process. The manuscript is well written. However the novelty is not clearly stated in the introduction.

Author Response

Thanks for the reviewer’s valuable comment. The novelty of this paper has been stated in the “Introduction” section. The supplementary contents are as follows: “The main novelty of this paper can be succinctly summarized as follows. (1) Experiments show that the droplet transfer information, keyhole characteristics parameters and changes in the shape of the molten pool are closely related to the welding state and weld formation, which can provide a new perspective for real-time state detection in the hybrid welding process. (2) The influence of characteristic changes of droplet transfer, keyhole and molten pool on welding quality in welding process monitoring was studied, and the reasons for such characteristic changes were further analyzed. (3) The comparative study found that the stability of the Y coordinate of the keyhole centroid Cy was significantly different under different welding conditions. The variance of the normalized characteristic signal was used to evaluate the fluctuation level of Cy. It is found that the variance of Cy in the case of root welding is about 45% higher than that in the case of normal penetration”.

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented paper "Online Detection of Keyhole Status in Laser-MIG Hybrid 2 Welding Process" is interesting from both a scientific and an industrial point of view" and is in accordance with the scope of the Metals journal. The work contains the necessary experiments that were carried out in an appropriate manner. The quality of the figures is very high The paper is relatively well written, but there are possibilities for improvement:
1. Introduction section could be wider, a more detailed literature review is needed. It is necessary to state more clearly the main objectives of the work, which is considered a novelty compared to the cited references. What are the possible limits of the research?
2. Introduction section... first sentence..."...or arc welding [3],...". Please provide some more recent references here with various arc-welding techniques (e.g. advanced GMAW process... https://doi.org/10.3390/met12071102 ), and so on.
3. The paper needs to be cleaned of typographical errors .. e.g. page 2, row 76... "was 0mm.""... use space between "0" and "mm".
4. Conclusion section - it is necessary to focus only on the most important achievements of the paper. Use bullet-for and highlight the novelties of the paper.
5. Future work, if any?

6. References 5-7 are not formatted in accordance with the journal format. Why are the authors' names written with capital letters?

Author Response

Reply of Reviewer#2:

Comments:

1. Introduction section could be wider, a more detailed literature review is needed. It is necessary to state more clearly the main objectives of the work, which is considered a novelty compared to the cited references. What are the possible limits of the research?

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. A wider and more detailed literature review has been undertaken in the “Introduction” section. Thermal sensors and acoustics sensors used in the welding monitoring have been reviewed. The main objective of the work is to detect the welding status using the optical techniques, laying the foundation for subsequent welding adaptive control. The novelty of this paper has been stated in the introduction. A possible limitation of the study is that when the voltage and current of the arc is too high, it can result in an excessive arc flash. If the visual image is collected from the top of the welding plate, it will be difficult to obtain clear visual features due to the strong arc interference.

2. Introduction section... first sentence..."...or arc welding [3],...". Please provide some more recent references here with various arc-welding techniques (e.g. advanced GMAW process... https://doi.org/10.3390/met12071102 ), and so on.

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. some more recent references here with various arc-welding techniques have been provided in the “Introduction” section.

3. The paper needs to be cleaned of typographical errors .. e.g. page 2, row 76... "was 0mm.""... use space between "0" and "mm".

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. Space has been added between “0” and “mm” in the paper. Other typographical errors in the paper have been checked and revised.

4. Conclusion section - it is necessary to focus only on the most important achievements of the paper. Use bullet-for and highlight the novelties of the paper.

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. The most important achievement of the paper has been highlight in the “Conclusion” section: “The comparative study found that the stability of the Y coordinate of the keyhole centroid Cy was significantly different under different welding conditions. The variance of the normalized characteristic signal was used to evaluate the fluctuation level of Cy. It is found that the variance of Cy in the case of root welding is about 45% higher than that in the case of normal penetration”.

5. Future work, if any?

Reply: Thanks for the reviewer’s kind reminder. Future work has been discussed in the “Conclusion” section: “Future work is mainly carried out from two aspects: on the one hand, combining visual sensing technology with photoelectric sensing technology which is more suitable for industrial applications, to monitor and analyze the welding process, promoting the transformation of academic research results into practical industrial applications. On the other hand, according to the detection signal of the welding process, a process stability control system that adjusts welding parameters in real time is constructed to realize adaptive welding process stability adjustment, which can improve welding efficiency and quality”.

6. References 5-7 are not formatted in accordance with the journal format. Why are the authors' names written with capital letters?

Reply: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. The format of References 5-7 has been revised in the paper. And the format of all references has been checked. The revised contents have been marked in red.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an interesting work; however, prior to proceeding to the next step, the following comments should be addressed by the authors.

1.The language of the manuscript has to be improved.

2. Provide more in-depth discussion of related previous works.

3. Authors should also provide more meaningful discussions regarding the repeatability and reproducibility of the conducted tests/analysis.

4. In the “Conclusion” section, I recommend presenting more quantitative data as the main results of the research study.

Author Response

Reply of Reviewer#3:

Comments:

1. The language of the manuscript has to be improved.

Reply: Thanks for the reviewer’s kind reminder. The English expression has been corrected, trying to make an improvement. And the text has been marked in red.

2. Provide more in-depth discussion of related previous works.

Reply: Thanks for the reviewer’s kind reminder. More in-depth discussion of related previous works has been provided in the “Introduction” section: “Our related previous works [34] found that the opening frequency of keyhole bottom is higher and more stably in the welding process of good weld. The visual characteristics, such as the area of the bottom molten pool SMB, the centroid coordinates of the bottom molten pool (xc, yc), which reflect the formation process of root humps, can be used as a basis for judging whether the root hump has occurred. The main reason for the root hump is the lack of heat input. When increasing the energy input of the laser or arc, the root humps can be avoided”.

3. Authors should also provide more meaningful discussions regarding the repeatability and reproducibility of the conducted tests/analysis.

Reply: Thanks for the reviewer’s kind reminder. More discussions regarding the repeatability and reproducibility of the conducted tests have been provided in the “Results and discussion” section: “Under the same experimental conditions, five experiments were carried out for each group of welding process parameters, and the same weld types were obtained. There are slight differences in visual characteristics, but the overall regulation is consistent. The analytical results obtained using the comparative method based on the variance of Cy are consistent”.

4. In the “Conclusion” section, I recommend presenting more quantitative data as the main results of the research study.

Reply: Thanks for the reviewer’s kind reminder. More quantitative data as the main results of the research study has been presented in the “Conclusion” section: “The comparative study found that the stability of the Y coordinate of the keyhole centroid Cy was significantly different under different welding conditions. The variance of the normalized characteristic signal was used to evaluate the fluctuation level of Cy. It is found that the variance of Cy in the case of root humping is about 45% higher than that in the case of normal penetration”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

*

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comment. English language and style have been checked.

Reviewer 3 Report

It seems the authors addressed the comments and now the manuscript looks okay.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable comment. English language and style have been checked.

Back to TopTop