Session

Economic Update – What to Expect in 2025 and Beyond

The US macro economy is traversing the back side of the business cycle while several industrial sectors are going through a mild recession. Aggressive interest rate policy decisions by the Fed mostly stamped out inflation, but they also stifled capital investment and borrowing costs. Despite a resilient labor market, cracks are visible in the armor of US consumers, with delinquency rates for credit cards and auto loans flashing warning signs. However, leading indicators are pointing to acceleration by the time we get to 2025. What does all this mean for your business? This presentation will deliver practical and actionable advice designed to help business leaders plan for future economic conditions and continuously improve their organization’s strategic planning initiatives.

Attendees will walk away from the session with the following insights:

• Time-sensitive economic events of public concern such as inflation, interest rates, labor market conditions, consumer spending, business investment and industrial activity
• Tools that company leadership can use to become better data-driven decision makers in running their businesses

Session

Resistance Welding: Spot and Projection Standards and Quality

This presentation encourages a new perspective of the quality for both spot and projection welding. The goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the pertinent aspects of both resistance welds, and the standards they are evaluated against. After this presentation, you may never look at a resistance weld the same way again.

Session

Artificial Intelligence for Interpretation of Ultrasonic Process Monitoring Data from Resistance Spot Welding

Primarily due to efficiency, lightweighting, and electrification endeavors, there is an increasing use of next-generation materials, dissimilar material joints, and stackups that are particularly sensitive to welding parameters in automotive assembly. Accordingly, monitoring the resistance spot welding (RSW) process and evaluating its outcomes has never been so crucial in automotive manufacturing. However, statistical destructive and nondestructive tests still remain common.

Various recent advancements in computing and artificial intelligence (AI) have made it possible to interpret nondestructive evaluation (NDE) data at the throughput and performance levels necessary to justify its inline use in automotive manufacturing for a variety of applications. In particular, deep learning has established the state of the art in countless tasks in computer vision and natural language processing, and consequently it continues to be increasingly studied and applied in NDE, including in the automotive industry.

This presentation highlights three automotive manufacturing applications for ultrasonic NDE data interpretation using AI. High-speed, high-performance AI has been developed and is used for interpretation of RSW inline ultrasonic process monitoring data to 1) facilitate post-weld quality assessment, 2) enable real-time RSW process monitoring with closed-loop per-millisecond feedback from ultrasonic NDE, and 3) establish a means of monitoring resistance spot riveting for dissimilar-material joining. The presentation will discuss the unique challenges and novel solutions for each of these use cases, demonstrate AI system performance, and highlight key directions for future research.

This presentation demonstrates that AI can enhance, facilitate automation of, and provide new value to well-established NDE methodologies. AI and other smart manufacturing technologies enable new NDE use cases, enable innovative vehicle body designs, facilitate the use of novel joining technologies, improve vehicle safety, improve manufacturing efficiency, and reduce waste – consequently, they are poised to make NDE 4.0 a reality in automotive manufacturing.