Why is the welding of rocket engine still manual?

First of all, it can be determined that the welding of rocket engines is mostly manual or semi-automatic. The main reasons are as follows:

1. The rocket engine is basically produced in one piece, or trial-produced. Even in mass production, the number is very small, a few or dozens. If the welding robot is developed, firstly, the cost is very high; Second, it wastes a lot. A robot is scrapped after welding a model of a rocket engine.

2. As far as the current intelligent technology is concerned, it is impossible to develop a dexterous, compact, changeable, versatile and universal robot like human beings to adapt to the ever-changing products of various structures, shapes and sizes.

It is a mature technology for industrial robots to weld rocket engines. This is not a state secret.

Blue Arrow Aerospace's civil rocket aerospace enterprise, rocket engine combustion chamber and nozzle are all welded by industrial robots.

This was made by a Korean laser in 20 19, using a 6-axis robot of 2 10kg from Kuka.

The 20kw welding process developed by Han Laser is laser welding. Joint research and development of sandwich nozzle for large diameter rocket engine by welding Blue Arrow Aerospace.

Firstly, the application and advantages of robot laser welding workstation in aero-engine are introduced, and then the advantages of manual welding are discussed.

The sprinkler irrigation and combustion chamber of rocket engine belong to the middle plate, and the theoretical thickness should be 6 mm-12 mm. This plate is not the same as the boom structure of our usual simple excavator. We usually call the arm beam of an excavator a thick plate.

Because the material of rocket ramjet is special, we don't know what it is in theory. But it must be dissimilar metal steel, which is definitely different from our common carbon steel, aluminum alloy, titanium alloy and so on.

We see that there are 800 laser welding points on the base.

So the difficulty lies in: work efficiency, consistency, stable action, and ultimately affect the product qualification rate.

In fact, this welding is more suitable for industrial robots. It should also be done by robots to ensure the qualified rate.

Anyone who has been exposed to welding knows that this kind of product, which has to withstand high heat and pressure, is actually similar to the welding of pressure vessels. (Pressure vessels: such as pumps, fermenters, compressor shells, etc.). )

Advantages of industrial robot welding in this field;

1, weld tracking. It may be far from what ordinary people call artificial intelligence.

How do industrial robots find out where the weld is? Weld tracking is realized by laser sensor.

Looking at the seam tracking of an ordinary scene, the laser transmitter realizes the line imaging according to the reverse color of the metal surface.

2. Fast speed and high standard.

The main advantage of robot welding is that it can maintain high consistency and speed up the welding processing time of the whole workpiece.

This kind of robot is a universal robot and does not need special development. 2 10kg kuka is available in the market.

The difficulty of robot welding rocket engine lies in technical difficulty.

That is how to make manual welding work and let robots do it.

Most people may think, isn't this just to let robots feel welding according to people's movements and speeds?

Actually, it's not. There are some feedbacks in welding that robots can never do. That's why Ran Ran needs craftsmen from these big countries.

This is why, with the successful application of robot welding, why do you still keep this manual welding? In terms of target period and final rate of return, the labor force still has advantages. But the advantage will definitely get smaller and smaller in the future.

As for the 1 solder joint you mentioned, it takes 10 minutes to weld, and that robot can also weld. This is called 3D printing welding.

There are 3000 solder joints, not many, and there are more than 4600 solder joints on the car body.

However, these great craftsmen supported China's space industry with their hands, which is really great. Technical work is a reward!

First of all, the future development prospect-with the development of industrial technology, the welding manufacturing work of core industries including rocket engine nozzles will be gradually completed by industrial robots, because from the perspective of work efficiency, product yield and intelligent manufacturing development, industrial robots will be the future development prospect. For example, domestic Blue Arrow Aerospace, foreign space exploration technology companies and other aerospace companies have begun to use welding robots to complete the welding of rocket engine nozzles, which is more in line with the overall transformation from industrial manufacturing to industrial intelligence. At this stage, under the premise that some aerospace companies have begun to use welding robots to weld rocket engine nozzles, domestic and foreign companies still pay more attention to manual welding of rocket engine nozzles for many reasons:

First, historical reasons and stable demand have determined that launch vehicles and missiles have been invented for decades. In the decades when the early automation technology was not very advanced, the welding work of this kind of rocket engine has been done by people. Therefore, not only a lot of mature experience has been accumulated in decades of use, but also these welding technology products have passed the maturity and reliability tests of hundreds of actual launches, so it is difficult to completely change these processing technologies that have been technically verified for dozens of times without any problems in a short time. Therefore, although the welding efficiency of the welding robot is higher, how far is the qualification rate of its welding process from manual welding? It still needs several or even dozens of actual space launches to test its quality. After all, how strong is the carrying capacity of low-earth orbit rockets for this special type of work? Equipped with several engines, the reliability of the rocket is the most critical for all astronauts. Even in the final rocket molding process, in order to improve the reliability index of the rocket, the carrying capacity of the rocket will be deliberately reduced to ensure its higher reliability index. Then, when the welding robot has not shown mature reliability in the nozzle welding of the core rocket engine, who should bear the risks caused by rashly adopting new technology and who should be responsible? Therefore, based on the historical and stable demand, although some private aerospace companies have started to use welding robots to manufacture rocket engines in order to reduce the R&D cost in recent years, for the national team, choosing manual welding, which seems to be backward but more mature and reliable, can "effectively" ensure the smooth launch of rockets and the space development of the whole country. At the same time, compared with the welding robot, which is only completed in sequence according to the program code, it can not be adjusted at any time according to external uncertain factors, and the welding temperature and welding speed can be adjusted at any time according to uncertain factors such as different materials, different qualities and different welding angles in the manual welding process to ensure the welding quality. Second, the disadvantages of welding robots at this stage Although foreign space exploration technology companies and domestic Blue Arrow Aerospace have completely replaced the nozzle manufacturing of rocket engines at this stage, the two rocket engines, including Merlin series of space exploration technology companies and Tianque of Blue Arrow Aerospace, are only simple models, which are simpler in structure and less difficult to process than the international liquid rocket engines with greater thrust and more advanced circulation methods, so they are more suitable for welding. On the one hand, the current welding robot is competent for this welding work, and on the other hand, the yield, working efficiency and manufacturing cost of welding robot are better than manual welding. Especially for these private aerospace enterprises that need to launch a large number of orders to achieve profitability, it is the key to their success to safely and reliably send their customers' spacecraft into the scheduled orbit in a shorter time and at a lower launch cost. For the rocket engine with more complicated cycle, the welding robot at present is not enough to complete the welding manufacture of the whole rocket engine. For example, the YF- 100 liquid rocket engine used in the Long March 5 rocket booster adopts the staged combustion mode with the highest cycle efficiency, and the whole rocket engine structure is more complicated. At the same time, in order to reduce the volume of the rocket engine, many parts are basically close together, so at this time, these narrow spaces can only be welded by workers with flexible wrists to ensure their reliability. Of course, from the general development direction, with the development and update of technology, it is believed that in the future, high-value welding work such as rocket engine nozzle and nuclear reactor cooling wall will be gradually replaced by welding robots. After all, as long as the welding robot solves the reliability and flexibility of welding, its advantages such as stability, working efficiency and low manufacturing cost are incomparable to manual welding. For example, a super-top welder like Gao Fenglin often takes ten minutes to weld a solder joint, while it takes several months to weld thousands of solder joints of a rocket engine. With a welding robot with higher working efficiency and better stability, it may take less than one day to complete. Therefore, although manual welding still has advantages at this stage, it does not mean that it will always become the mainstream and irreplaceable. Just like there used to be many traditional manufacturing processes around us, with the development of new technologies, many of these traditional processes have gradually disappeared. Some have no demand, and some are replaced by low-cost, high-quality large-scale production processes because of the difficulty, complexity and high time cost of processing. Therefore, welding is no exception, especially with the mature development of 3D printing technology, the future rocket engine can carry out 3D printing as required, with higher time efficiency, lower processing cost, and reliability and stability still above the horizontal line, which is also the process of technological progress and the development of the times.

Robot welding needs to be debugged repeatedly, even if the products with low output are counted, the amount wasted during debugging is higher than the output. . . .

First, people are better than machines in some processing abilities. Of course, those workers are also rare figures.

Second, some promotional videos can just watch the excitement. Sometimes, in order to facilitate publicity, you make some fake, endless things and talk to Trump.

In the craftsman of a big country, the rocket engine is welded. It seems that the man has welded more than 20,000 solder joints, and almost one pipe has three solder joints, that is, the rocket engine has almost six or seven thousand small pipes.

I made it myself, which revealed a secret, that is, China's rocket engines and aircraft engines are extremely backward.

Baidu, the Russian engines J 10 and al3 1 engines sold to China, also use hollow blades.

The same is true for rocket engines, whose nozzles are also hollow. If it is solid, no matter what metal, no matter what ceramic, then the heat of the engine will burn it out, because the hollow one is similar to the blade of an airplane engine.

Therefore, the nozzle of the rocket engine is also hollow, and injecting air into the hollow can take away heat and ensure that it will not be burned out.

Since it is not mass production, China has issued so many models over 300 times since it started to launch rockets. How to build a production line with this manufacturing volume?

Unlike similar welding of aircraft carrier frame plate, engine welding has irregular shape, different requirements for welding materials and narrow space, which is inconvenient for machine operation. The welding accuracy of human beings is still much higher than that of machines, but the efficiency is low. I believe that in the near future, machine welding will be realized and manpower will be liberated.

Artificial intelligence cannot keep up with human intelligence.

It shows that the equipment is not good, and welding can only be done by hand, which also shows that the flexibility and accuracy of manual work are not comparable to that of machines.