Engineering Commons^™

Double-Electrode Arc Welding Process: Principle, Variants, Control And Developments, Yi Lu, Shujun Chen, Yu Shi, Xiangrong Li, Jinsong Chen, Lee Kvidahl, Yu Ming Zhang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Double-electrode gas metal arc welding (DE-GMAW) is a novel welding process in which a second electrode, non-consumable or consumable, is added to bypass part of the wire current. The bypass current reduces the heat input in non-consumable DE-GMAW or increases the deposition rate in consumable DE-GMAW. The fixed correlation of the heat input with the deposition in conventional GMAW and its variants is thus changed and becomes controllable. At the University of Kentucky, DE-GMAW has been tested/developed by adding a plasma arc welding torch, a GTAW (gas tungsten arc welding) torch, a pair of GTAW torches, and a GMAW torch. …