Designing a new three dimensional mig-mag weld seam form by voxelized paraboloid

Keywords: Weld seam, virtual welding simulator, voxelization, marching cubes In this study, a real-time and three-dimensional weld seam form was modeled for a low-cost virtual welding simulator developed for training welder candidates. Through this simulator, candidates can learn welding techniques in a safe environment without causing any work accidents and improve their skills by performing more applications than usual in a short time. In the developed simulator, special virtual reality devices such as Flock of Birds position and orientation sensor and head mounted display are used. The simulation determines the weld bead shape and amount of penetration based on data from the Flock of Birds sensor device monitoring the position of the torch. When forming the weld bead shape, parabola was used as the basic bead shape unit due to the similarity of the weld bead slice with the parabola. The values of the height, width and penetration parameters of the basic weld bead shape that will form our weld seam were obtained from the weld seam experiments in the literature. During the virtual welding process, the weld bead shape parameter values are calculated at specified time intervals using the feed-forward back-propagation artificial neural network. TrainLM (Levenberg-Marquardt) was used as the training function for network design. While determining the most appropriate transfer function, it was found that LogSig () function gave the best result. The number of hidden layers and the number of process elements (neurons) in each hidden layer were determined by trial and error method. In the same time interval, the voxel map and the corresponding hash-based octree data structure are generated in real time. By using voxelized data, the triangular isosurfaces of the weld bead are reconstructed using the marching cubes algorithm. This results a more realistic weld seam appearance. This image and virtual scene are continuously sent to the head mounted display to maintain the sense of reality in the virtual environment. Multi-threaded programming technique is also used to shorten the processing time in high resolution virtual scenes for voxelization and isosurface extraction processes. The isosurface extraction times for different number of threads are also shown.