Most cars contain thousands of spot welds which join various sheet metal parts together and to the body. These welds are critical to the safety and performance of a car. Inspecting the quality of a spot weld is difficult because the weld is in between the sheets of metal that have been joined, meaning that you can’t visually inspect it.

The Adaptive Welding Group are working on a method to provide better confidence in the quality of welded parts by correlating patterns in the resistance signature across the weld with the ultimate tensile strength. Using this method, we will be able to detect defective welds, and track weld quality over time so that car manufacturers can fix problems before any bad welds are produced.