A study on an intelligent system to predict the tensile stress in welding using solar energy concentration

Plastics are now rapidly displacing conventional materials in numerous engineering applications in mass production. The emerging requirement to produce larger and more complex forms of plastics and their composites has increased the need for joining, in particular, the thermoplastics. Thermoplastics can be softened and melted on heating and hardened on cooling repeatedly without considerable degradation. Therefore, thermoplastic parts can easily be joined or formed by various manufacturing processes. In this paper, an intelligent system for the selection of process parameters for obtaining the optimal tensile stress in welding using solar energy concentration (SEC) system is presented. To consider these quality characteristics for the selection of process parameters (solar radiation, temperature and duration), the factorial design is adopted to analyze the effect of each process parameter on the tensile stress, and then to determine the process parameters with the optimal tensile stress. The algorithms are obtained by the multiple regression technique. Finally, confirmation tests are performed to make a comparison between the results calculated from the developed system and the experimental results.