What is Welding Engineering?

Welding Engineering is a rare, but we exist and do things: Welding engineering is a multi disciplined skillset that is more than meets the eye. Let’s break down what welding engineers do and why.

BLUFF

Empirical Knowledge: Welding and metallurgy is infinitely deep. Welding engineers spend years acquiring knowledge of metal forming and joining processes to understand what’s going on.

Problem Solving: No one calls a welding engineer when everything is going smoothly. Welding engineers are there to fix a manufacturing or quality problem.

Optimization: Welding Engineering is the practice and art of optimizing and solving complex challenges related to welding and joining of material. Quality and cost are the two most common optimizations.

Code Interpretation: Welding Engineers create, interpret and use codes and quality processes to ensure welded products are safe and reliable, and then transmit that information to all parties involved.

What is a Welding Engineer?

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably never heard of welding engineering or know what they do. That’s okay, we can’t all be perfect. I had personally never heard of welding engineering until I was two years into my training as a welder. A fellow welding student mentioned they were thinking of going to welding engineering school and my first thought was “That is an option?”. I had loved welding and the science and metallurgy behind it, so I was interested in going some deeper into the why.

The truth is, if it can be manufactured or designed there is an engineer who supports it. Welding is very technical and complex and needs dedicated engineering support. Welding engineering joins the ranks of topics like plastics engineering, acoustical engineering (not audio engineering), explosive engineering etc as rare but real. I find the cycle of welding engineering falls into a main loop:

1. Empirical knowledge: Knowing things about the welding processes to begin the journey.

2. Problem solving: Tackling an often open ended question or problem usually focused around “how can I join these things together”

3. Optimization: Use all the tools of engineering to optmize for success, such as faster, cheaper, higher quality, eliminate defects etc.

4. Code interpretation and process: Take all the information and present it to welders and engineers in a way that can be codified. Welding Engineers are pastry chefs that make recipes for good welds.

Before we dig into this cycle lets also cover what welding engineers are not. What isn’t Welding Engineering: * Just a welder who can write procedures. Welding Engineering is a 4 year degree offered by engineering programs and covers all of the discipline and requirements of any engineering program

• A Metallurgist or material scientist who focuses on welding. Welding Engineering has a lot of distinct and practical job requirements that fall outside of metallurgy. Understanding the physics of electrons and energy flow doesn’t make you an electrical engineer.

• A mechanical engineer who was forced to work on welding for a bit. I often see mismatch when engineers who come from other disciplines are tasked with welding engineering. Their skillsets are strong but they may be missing some of the fundamentals, and background to excel.

• Inaccessible. Multiple schools offer degrees in welding engineering and code books are available for free or cheap. It is a field you can start learning! Now back to what welding engineers do:

What Welding Engineers do

Empirical knowledge Welding is a field with unlimited depth and things that are knowable, the goal isn’t to memorize everything. There’s over 30 recognized welding processes (and probably many more that I haven’t heard of). But all of the processes draw on the same principles. Staring with metallurgy which is the basis of technical understanding of what happens to metals when you weld them with heat. All* metallic bonds create crystals, applying heat or stress changes crystal structure, pretty much every metal you deal with will be an alloy of two or more elements. Welding changes all of these. The basics of welding engineering will almost always come down to applied metallurgy and what happens when you heat up metal, add elements, remove elements and taking something from room temperature to thousands of degrees and back to room temperature in a matter of seconds. Since 90% of all metal produced by tonnage is steel, it is good to understand the basics of a phase change diagram of steel and work from there.

I would also like to distinguish there’s “things you should know” and things you can look up in a book. I know that adding carbon changes the crystalline structure of steel. I use a book to look up what 0.02% carbon does to the grain structure at 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. Being able to know the latter is a matter of memorization and will occur in the areas you work on. Beyond metallurgy a healthy understanding of basic civil engineering from a statics and strength of materials standpoint comes into play. Most welding engineers don’t cover thermal or dynamics. We’re paid to make things stay still, not to make them move, and thermal engineering is interesting but only a small percentage of WE’s are called into study the movement of heat through metal as that’s usually the output of our job, not the input.

Finally, welding has a healthy chunk of industrial engineering principles and quality engineering principles. I.e how to do make things go faster or more efficiently, and how do you do the same thing consistently without mistakes. Put this all together and you look like an engineer who spent 2 years learning engineering principles, 1 year learning mechanical engineering basics, 1 year learning industrial engineering, 1 year learning quality engineering, and 2 years learning metallurgy. If you count it up, it requires you to join (pun intended) multiple engineering disciplines into a cohesive understanding of the science and practicality of sticking things together (usually with heat).

Problem solving Once you have a healthy understanding of the science of welding the biggest chunk of the role is problem solving. The joke is “no one ever calls a welding engineer when everything is going okay”. The vast majority of building things out of metal never rise to the need of calling in a welding engineer. However when welds start cracking, money is being wasted, or human lives are on the line welding engineers are called.

I’ll give you a hint 90%of all welding problems are cleanliness. The other 10% are extremely complex interactions of multiple factors, that you can only tackle once you know the weld is clean. In practice this means having an internal flow chart of potential problems starting with most likely and continuing to cycle down until you find the likely candidate. The basic problem is that heat distorts metal, and changes the bulk mechanical properties of metal… but you need to add heat* to melt things together. Also time is money so the faster you can go with higher likelihood of success the better the economics of welding look.

In basic principle this usually means trying to minimize heat input to reduce distortion and then focusing on ways to increase the process speed or cost. Defects are the enemy of a strong weld so most of the effort is ways to eliminate or reduce defects.

Optimization

If I could sum up 20 years of experience, it’s that all systems can be optimized. It is the role of a welding engineer to optimize and solve challenges related to the joining of materials. Once you have your problem figured out you are there to optimize. Optimization can take the form of cost, strength, quality, usability etc. Optimization is about balancing all the requirements and coming up with a preferred course of action. Unlike analytical fields there’s very rarely a “right” or purely calculatable solution for the ideal weld. Often “best” in one area results in a trade off in other areas that must be carefully weighed and considered.

What are you optimizing for?. To answer that question you have to go higher and understand what the weld is doing in context of the entire system, what the needs are, and what success looks like. There’s two common flavors of optimization I see the most. Quality and cost, if that doesn’t work I have a final third option.

Quality: For most simple problems the answer is to solve a problem economically so that the weld is probably stronger than the base metal and won’t fail. For advanced problems you are proving to statistical certainty that a weld under a given set of conditions the weld has the highest likelihood of being defect free and even if there were defects that you couldn’t detect, they do not negatively impact the welds performance from some baseline condition. Every quality problem is just making sure it meets those requirements cost effectively.

Cost: For cost the basic question is how to do you economically create the joint. Secret hint: The cheapest answer is almost always to not weld at all. The best way to increase weld quality and reduce cost is to not weld! The second best way is to increase quality (reduce scrap) followed by increasing speed. Everything from here will be a trade off of cost and probability of success. Which you will find out experimentally and with common sense. Doing something new: Often times there’s a practical upper limit, you’ve tried everything have all the best techniques but still aren’t getting to where you need. It’s time to evaluate something new. It could be a new process, a new joint or event a new metal. Sometimes the best answer is not to weld at all! Having a holistic view of solving problems is necessary vs “how do I make this weld perfect”. I find myself often fighting teams against my own existence because the best answer may be to redesign a part so that no welding has to take place at all. Think about all options.

Code Interpretation

Once you have every other problem understood, the final one is putting it all into work instructions that meet code requirements. Fun fact: the melting point of steel has never changed. Since metal doesn’t change and welding has existed for over a century many common facts, figures and best practices have been codified into standards and codes that create rules to make welds that are consistent. By far the most common standard is AWS D1.1 Structural steel welding also known as “the welding bible”. Chances are your question was already answered in D1.1 and is an excellent place to start. Unfortunately it’s a little too robust and comes in at over 1,000 pages! I prefer to start with AWS D17.1 Fusion welding for aerospace. At less than 150 pages it condenses the basic principles of weld quality into a much more skimmable standard and I start here whenever I want to do “high quality” work like aerospace. Mind you it only covers GTAW welding and may not be applicable for every problem. It’s the job of welding engineers to know, understand, interpret and argue the codes for making quality work. Beyond code interpretation directly there’s three other distinct groups welding engineers interrupt for:

Welders: Give them the information they need in clear and concise instructions so they can perform the welds. This is often conveyed in “Welding procedure specifications” (WPS) that is the recipe to make a good weld

Engineers: Give them enough information so they can evaluate and measure the fitness for use of a weld for a given application. This is a long and involved scientific answer. The good news is that generally the end goal of welding is to make it the same or higher strength than the base metal so the engineers can just ignore it in their strength calculations

The management: They want things done fast and cheap and welding engineers are responsible for balancing all other requirements to be cost effective.

All three of these groups want different things and like (or dislike) each other to varying degrees. The core is interpreting information to different groups with a healthy dose of peer mediation and conflict resolution. By far the biggest role is to just explain things “why is the weld cracking” is probably the most common question I get asked. Welders want to know what they need to do to prevent it, Engineers want to know how the problem is solved and won’t happen again, and the management wants to know what is the cost impact and how to minimize it.

How to work with Welding Engineers

It’s pretty simple, ask a clear question of what you want solved in your welding department and listen to their responses and proposals. I often see friction when the question is “can you solve all my problems by yourself and I don’t want to spend any money?”. Welding engineering is heavily driven by process and people that are outside of engineering control. Changing parameters on a welding machine is easy, having managers, welders and engineers agree to change their process and approach to welding is much more difficult and requires buy-in and cooperation from many personalities, which is often outside the welding engineers control. As the one interfacing with Welding Engineers give them the tools and assistance for areas outside their purview. If people aren’t willing to try new things, it will be hard for a welding engineer to find success.

Need help? Donut Tools offers welding consulting by the day or by the hour. Let us know how we can help with your welding needs.

Conclusion

The basic loop of understand a problem, figure out solution, optimize the process and interpret the answer to all parties is the vast majority of welding engineering challenges. But certainly not the limit. Training welders, programming robotic welding equipment and designing welds are other areas that come up but all rely on having this basic loop down. Welding engineering is a never ending pursuit not a qualification you check off. The best Welding engineers are curious, interested in learning new things and good with managing and educating others. I am grateful all those years ago a classmate mentioned this field to me! It’s helped me for years to keep the defects down and the spirits up!

-Joel Ifill.