I. Products - Air reservoir

Air reservoir is a gas storage facility in the truck brake system, which is used to store compressed gas. There are many places to use gas on the truck, small to the siren and big to the brake. If there is no air reservoir, the gas pumped out of a single air compressor is far from enough. At this time, it’s necessary to store the air pumped out by the air compressor in the air cylinder, waiting for a crucial time to use. At present, the heavy truck industry is in response to national lightweight requirements. The material of the air reservoir is mostly aluminum alloy, and the thickness is between 2.5mm and 3.5mm.

P1 Air Reservoir

II. On-site Welding Issues 

The air reservoir is composed of four parts: the left head cover, cylinder body, right head cover, and air nozzle on the head cover. The cylinder body is made of 2.8mm aluminum alloy, and the head caps on both sides are punched from the same material of aluminum alloy. There are four welding seams in the whole air reservoir, which are connecting the longitude seam of the cylinder body, the circular seam connecting the left head cover and cylinder body, the circular seam of the right head cover and cylinder body, and the connecting seam between air nozzle and head cover. In the past, customers adopted the traditional TIG method and welding efficiency was low. The MIG pulse welding method had been ever tried to improve the efficiency, but the defective rate was high, and the following issues had not been solved:

1）The back penetration of the weld seam is inconsistent, resulting in the low overall pass rate of the pressure test and a great potential safety hazard.

2）Many Spatter, and the spatter sticks to the surface of the cylinder and is hard to remove, which brings great difficulties to the subsequent spray painting process.

3）Weld seam is poorly formed and the color is black, which affects the overall appearance of air reservoir and the physical properties of weld seam are hard to guarantee.

4）The fusion between the air nozzle and head cover is extremely poor, and the weld crack is very easy to occurs.

III. Welding Machine and Solution Proposed by Megmeet

According to the actual welding situation, we recommended Megmeet Dex PM3000 welding machine with the double-pulse aluminum welding process. Dex PM3000 is a full digital high-frequency smart inverter welding machine that can perform DC pulse all-position welding of carbon steel, stainless steel, aluminum alloy, and other materials.

The welding machine has the following advantages to address customers problems:

1）Adopting a brand-new control scheme, arc starting is soft, welding arc is stable, arc energy is concentrated, fusion is deep, weld formation is consistent and spatter is low.

2）The double -pulse current tensity can reach up to 90%, which can weld clear and beautiful scaly figures.

3）A variety of aluminum welding expert systems are stored inside, and the parameters of each stage of pulse welding are opened, which can be fine-tuned according to the on-site working conditions to achieve superior welding performance.

P2 Air Nozzle

P3 The Cylinder Body

IV. Welding Results Comparsion

Megmeet Dex PM3000 cooperated with automation devices has achieved good results, and the overall efficiency has increased by 20%. The weld seam is well fused, and the non-defective rate of air nozzle welding reaches 99%. The scaly figure of the weld seam is beautiful and clear, and the color is silvery white, exceeding customers’ expectations. The back penetration of the weld seam is consistent, and the overall pass rate of the pressure test is 15% higher than in the past.

V. On-site Applications of Megmeet Dex PM3000 series welding machine

P4 Cylinder Body Welding

P5 Air Nozzle Welding