Recently, the award-winning projects of BRICS Industrial Innovation Contest (BRICS IIC) 2022 were officially announced. The project led by Prof. Li Yongbing from Shanghai Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacture for Thin-walled Structures won the only first prize in the intelligent manufacturing track.

Project name: Intelligent Monitoring and Control System of Welding Quality for Vehicle Manufacturing

Main contributors: Xia Yujun, Lei Haiyang, Li Zhuoran, Lv Tianle, Lou Ming, Li Yongbing

Resistance spot welding (RSW) is a main joining process for manufacturing of thin-walled vehicles such as automobiles, trains and spacecraft. The project aims at the current high cost and low efficiency RSW quality assurance method namely “manual inspection + offline adjustment", and has developed a series of innovative devices that reach the international leading level, including magnetically assisted electrodes, weld quality monitors and adaptive controllers. The devices promote the transformation of the quality assurance mode to the intelligent mode of "online inspection + real-time control", significantly improving the weld quality and optimizing the cost and efficiency of production lines. They have been applied to the manufacturing of more than 2000 urban rail trains and more than 3 million automobiles sold to domestic and "BRICS+" countries.

BRICS IIC 2022, jointly established by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, Fujian Provincial People's Government, and Xiamen Municipal People's Government, is one of the important outcomes of the 14th BRICS Summit. Focusing on the development direction of digitalization, networking, intelligence and greening of industry, the contest has set up three tracks: industrial internet, intelligent manufacturing and green development, and attracted 1330 teams from China, Brazil, Russia, India, Finland, United Kingdom, Sweden and other countries to participate. In the end, one first prize, two second prizes and three third prizes were selected for each track.