Gouging depth control in an automatic gouging machine

This paper presents the automatic gouging machine and the method to control a depth of gouged steel-plate. The automatic gouging machine can drive automatically at set speed and feed a carbon gouging-rod consecutively. To control a gouging depth, we use an arc length which occurs during a gouging work. By feed-backing and filtering the gouging voltage, we can know whether the arc length between a carbon rod and a steel plate is appropriate or not. The gouging depth is controlled by changing the feeding speed of a carbon gouging-rod according to difference between the feed-backed voltage and desired gouging voltage. We verified the good performance of the proposed method through actual test.