Welding gets lean & clean: equipment provides greater flexibility and smaller automation setups.

Obviously, in terms of visual impact, automated plastics-welding operations will never resemble the spark-showered scenes of robotic metal welding. But given the varieties of automation available and the efficiency of the processes, plastics welding offers perhaps even more dramatic automation benefits. In particular, among the many methods for joining plastics, ultrasonic welding and a less tried-and-true method, laser welding, are being tailored for lower-footprint and lower-tooling automation applications.

For the last ten years or so, users of ultrasonic welding have focused on the fundamentals of higher quality and faster throughput, says Sylvio Mainolfi, director of Product Worldwide for Branson Ultrasonics Corp. "They want to make sure that they get zero rejects as they can ramp up production volumes." Depending on the parts being joined, these volumes may reach from parts per minute to 360 per minute (or about 100 million assembled components per year).

There are two means for achieving these goals with welding automation: proper part …