Materials research engineer James Filla monitors a welding robot as part of a collaborative project with NIST manufacturing automation experts. NIST holds several patents in the areas of real-time sensing and control of welding processes. Through a continuing series of cooperative research and development agreements with automotive and heavy equipment manufacturers, NIST has helped several companies upgrade their sensors for welding quality control. The reseachers have already demonstrated the feasibility of real-time quality control under factory conditions for longer welds (1 minute and longer) and are now working on applying the technology to shorter welds where transient conditions (due to starting and stopping) are more important.

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