OPTIMIZATION OF BEAD GEOMETRY PARAMETERS OF ELECTRON BEAM WELDING USING ADVANCED OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES

The welding processes are used to get the welded joint of desired weld bead geometry, excellent mechanical strength and minimum distortion. The input parameters of welding process play very substantial role to determine the quality of a weld joint. This paper deals with the optimization aspects of the electron beam welding parameters. The objective is to minimize the weldment area (bead height and bead width) simultaneously satisfying the condition of maximum bead penetration of austenitic stainless steel plates of grade ASS-304 of thickness 5.0mm. The various input parameters such as welding voltage, welding current, welding speed are considered to optimize the bead geometry. For this constrained problem, the optimization is carried out using selected advanced optimization techniques namely teaching and learning based optimization, artificial bee colony, jaya algorithm, particle swarm optimization. The results of the presented algorithms are compared with genetic algorithm and it is found that the better minimum weldment area and maximum bead penetration is obtained by using these selected algorithms.