A magnetic sensor array for spot welding quality monitor

Spot welding is affected by many factors and is difficult to monitor the nugget information with single sensor. In this paper, a new monitor system based on sensors array technique was developed for spot welding quality detection. The key part in the system is cross magnetic sensor array. It is composed of six magnetic sensors. An improved algorithm was proposed to extract the signal eigenvalue, which was based on principle component analysis. The results show that in the case of the 60 mm experiment, cross magnetic sensor array works well. And when the eigenvalues range of the cross magnetic sensor array is 0.090 1-0.098 2, the spots quality is good. The analysis of the eigenvalues of the cross magnetic sensor array allows us to determine whether the spot quality is good or bad.