Development of a novel approach for characterising electron beams and quality assurance of welds

This paper presents a novel approach to characterise electron beams for quality assurance of electron beam welded joints for the aerospace industry. The weld quality depends on beam characteristics that can be affected by variations in the gun controls and power supplies, physical changes in the electron gun or the conditions in the vacuum chamber. In the present research, a device using a slit based measuring technique has been used to capture a small portion of the electron beam and to characterise it. The acquired signals are processed to generate a set of features using wavelet transforms. The focus of the paper is to demonstrate the significance of these features generated from different decomposition levels in differentiating electron beams with different characteristics and hence their role in providing quality assurance of welds.