Development of electron optical capabilities for manufacturing of large components by Electron Beam Welding

Abstract

Electron beam welding (EBW) is a fast process that shows promise to use for high productivity welding of thick section components in the nuclear Industry. Nuclear AMRC has been working for many years on devloping the use of EBW for Small Modular Reactor (SMR) applications, such as joining thick section pressure vessel components. The major strength of EB is the single pass process that can radically reduce fabrication times. This is also one of the major issues with EB. The stress on the welding operator is high as any error generally means failure. For in chamber EB operation, such as the Pro-beam K2000 system at Nuclear AMRC, once the chamber is closed the only interaction between the operator and the work piece is through a camera or the electron beam. Tracking features of the material or the joint line is important to gather as much information on the situation as possible. Nuclear AMRC have used the functions of the Pro-beam multimode to gain reliability during welding. The team has demonstrated that the beam can be setup to high precision, assess whether a work piece has been correctly installed, a large joint can be fully seam tracked and features can be extracted from the data giving indication whether a joint can be safely welded or not. The system can automatically warn the operator if some situations are reached i.e., too large joint gap, too high magnetism and can correct itself.