Published in Welding Journal in October 2008

Some common sense solutions are offered for problems that plague sensors.

One weld cell manager said, “Sensors in welding cells are simply failure prone. They’re associated with high material consumption and they are the cause of both planned and unplanned downtime. It’s the way it is. We work around the issues, have sensor change out down to a few minutes and have even installed a couple of industrial vending machines so availability is instantaneous. We’ve simply accepted it and live in this paradigm.”

When it comes to sensors, cables, and connectors in weld cells, weld cell management people are so used to the high cost of constant replacement, downtime, and lost productivity that they begin to think it’s natural that weld cells are hostage to large amounts of production-robbing downtime. Sensors are frequently physically damaged by loading impact. Slag, weld debris, and heat ruin not only the sensors, but their associated connectivity. It gets to the point that most people involved with weld cells start thinking there’s not much you can do about the wastage but put in a vending machine or some kind of sensor-dispensing system close at hand — as if having replacement parts nearby is a viable process improvement.

Read entire article here (.pdf)