Hexagon Partners with ESAB

Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has signed a partnership agreement with ESAB, a global fabrication technology leader, to create a streamlined welding solution combining Hexagon’s powerful simulation software with ESAB’s InduSuite solutions to help fabricators perform more efficient and successful welding operations. Hexagon’s simulation intelligence, embedded within ESAB’s software and automation portfolio, will ensure that users have the tools required to consistently manufacture high-quality products without costly trial and error.

Producing successful welds can be challenging without the benefit of many years’ shop-floor experience and, even with an extensive welding experience, can incur high costs from waste and time. The need to increase process efficiency for the production of welded products in industries such as automotive, aerospace and capital-intensive machinery has increased automation in recent years, but manufacturers now stand to benefit from additional gains by automating elements of design for manufacturing, and ensuring consistent and reliable welding processes with simulation.

ESAB’s InduSuite increases efficiency and precision on the shop floor by enabling fabricators to digitize welding processes for its machines and centralizing weld specifications to ensure consistent, high quality welding operations. This will now include Hexagon’s Simufact Welding software, helping users to optimize weld sequences and locations by predicting issues such as component distortion based upon induced stresses for operators at the machine. Through the partnership, Hexagon will utilize key parameters from ESAB’s automated robotic fabrication machines to build and refine a digital twin so that fabricators can better gain a deeper understanding of their process, making optimal data-driven decisions without relying solely on costly trial and error.

To bring products to market faster than ever without compromising on quality, manufacturers need to move quickly from underdefined or unrefined processes to delivering competitive quality and cost. Using simulation to automate process creation and refinement reduces or eliminates physical manufacturing iterations, and the resulting scrap. For example, battery pack demand has increased dramatically as a result of transport electrification, but each fabricated structure can require up to 10,000 welds. Each joint must be robust, and perform in an optimal sequence that accounts for efficiency whilst ensuring thermal-mechanical stresses do not compromise the joint and product quality.

About Hexagon

Hexagon is a digital reality solutions, combining sensor, software and autonomous technologies provider. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division provides solutions that use data from design and engineering, production and metrology to make manufacturing smarter. For more information, visit hexagonmi.com.

Hexagon has approximately 22,000 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately 4.3bn EUR. Learn more at hexagon.com.