Emerson's New Ultrasonic Metal Spot Welder Delivers Repeatable, High-Quality Welds

Emerson announces its new Branson™ GMX-20MA ultrasonic metal spot welder, an advanced spot welder that bonds nonferrous metals, including bus bars, foils, switches, and wire terminations in automotive electrical systems, electric vehicles, batteries and battery packs, power storage systems and related applications.

The GMX-20MA metal spot welder is built around an all-new, rigid pneumatic actuator with dual linear bearings and a digital load cell to ensure smoother vertical motion and more precise downforce control for maximum weld quality and repeatability. Actuator travel and tool positioning relative to the welded parts are tracked and measured using a linear encoder. Once tooling/part contact is made, a digital load cell measures and maintains a precise level of actuator downforce on the parts, ensuring that weld energy is accurately delivered and consistent weld quality is assured from one weld to the next.

“The unique dual linear bearing design used in the Branson GMX-20MA actuator makes it the strongest, and most rigid and precise actuator available in the ultrasonic metal welding market,” said Alex Yeung, global business development manager, metal welding for Emerson. “For our customers, that means the GMX-20MA welder will deliver the highest repeatability and stability for metal spot welding in many different conditions.”

The programmable controls of the GMX-20MA enable operators to manage the welding process in multiple modes: time, energy, peak power and distance. These versatile weld modes, together with the welder’s advanced digital controls, ensure the added precision required to maintain tight weld process control despite occasional variations in part surface quality or cleanliness. In most cases, the high-frequency, lateral scrubbing action of the ultrasonic tooling eliminates the need to pre-clean parts.

The GMX-20MA is programmed through a user-friendly, touchscreen human-machine interface (HMI) housed in the unit’s Branson 2000Xd power supply/controller. The touchscreen makes creating, editing and recalling stored production recipes fast and simple. The touchscreen HMI also opens up access to the unit’s multiple welding control modes and enables users to configure production- and quality-monitoring solutions.

Throughout the production process, the GMX-20MA power supply/controller continuously compiles and stores extensive weld quality and traceability data. It also conducts amplitude stepping for optimization of weld strength and appearance, with built-in cycle counters to track production. Total cycle time can be displayed in the weld results screen, which allows user to monitor key operating parameters. The unit’s Visual Quality Screen (VQS) monitors and displays real-time quality data so that even small variations can be identified and corrected immediately.