Arc Welding Process Selection through a Quality and Costs

This paper presents a methodology to compare three welding processes, namely SAW (submerged arc welding), SMAW (shield metal arc welding) and GMAW (gas metal arc welding) and to select the best one for a given application. Study is the selection of arc welding process for improving quality and welding cost case in MIE and proposes a method for determining the welding process by comparing time, quality and cost, against one over the other of the three types of Arc welding. The welds were carried out in MIE training center. The selection was based on double criteria: operational costs and non-quality costs. The former is related to the normal costs evaluated in such kind of decision, like consumable cost, labor cost, etc. The is the financial loss suffered by the client every time response variable drifts away from its target value or presents variability. The results indicated that the non-quality and operational costs for the SAW process are slightly lower in comparison to the GMAW and SMAW. SAW is selective among them for quality wise. Therefore, it is the best process for the given application. However; cost incurs little high for GMAW.