Double Bottom Welding at
Kvaerner Philadelphia (USA)

Recently, the RinasWeld software was installed at the newly built Kvaerner Philadelphia shipyard for welding of double bottom sections.

In this installation a RinasWeld-ARAC solution is implemented. The RinasWeld system was especially designed to interface with the Kranendonk ARAC system for programming of 2 ABB robots in a gantry system.

The main programming steps in this solution are:

• Import of 3D CAD data model

• Modification of weld data as required (through a graphical user interface)

• Automatic generation of welding sequence for the robot, and parameters for the ARAC macros

• ARAC generates actual robot programs

• Generated robot programs are checked for collision

Based on a thorough analysis of the 3D geometry received from the CAD system, RinasWeld is automatically generating all necessary information for the macro-based ARAC system, which then generates complete ABB robot programs, ready for use in the production.

For the purpose of subdividing large blocks, upon the initial intelligent segmentation, which is an automatic process in RinasWeld, a graphical user interface provides great flexibility in defining individually sized segments (typically seen as boxes). By using this feature, segment borders may be changed, deleted and even new borders can be made.

Finally, the resulting robot programs are checked for collision in RinasWeld.