Review of Achievements of E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute in Development of Equipment for Electron Beam Welding

Over the past twenty years the Electric Welding Institute named after E.O. Paton has developed and manufactured great number of “general-purpose” machines for EBW, used for welding of various products made of various materials. All these machines may be roughly divided into several types according to the welding chamber volume and therefore the possible sizes of welded products: “small”, “medium”, “large” and “extra large”. They specificity is reviewed briefly in the article. The machines are equipped with an up-to-date 60 kV welding power source of 6 … 60 kW power, depending upon the specific welded materials and their thicknesses. Typically, all machines are completed with the system of secondary-emission electron visualization “RASTR-6”, inseparably integrated into the welding power source. It interacts with an up-to-date control system. The part of equipment, which is exerting influence on the welding process, is under continuous program control. The concept of high-level software control, in which the user interacts with the equipment exclusively via the Windows-oriented graphical user interface, is used. Two basic configurations of the system of numerical control for EBW machines are used. The first uses of a complete industrial system Sinumerik 840Dsl, and the second one uses “short-cut” industrial system Synamics S120. In both cases the interaction of the control programs with executive equipment is carried out using two industrial buses CAN and ProfiBUS.