Research projects

The Belgian Welding Institute has performed a collective research project about the innovative variants of the commonly used welding processes GTAW and MIG/MAG welding.

The project aimed to determine to what extent these variants may contribute to a reduction of the production costs (welding costs) by increasing the productivity and the efficiency of the process.
By means of this project, the participating companies received a better understanding of the capabilities of these modified welding processes, in order to facilitate the introduction of these new welding processes in the Belgian industry.

STEEL S4 EV aims at putting high strength steels at the forefront of a new trend in electric vehicles: light vehicles with three or four wheels that comply with crash regulation and with more restrictive Euro NCAP demands. Weld joint design and welding methodologies research to maintain the material properties in the weld area, assuring robustness and long term durability. Cost-effective low-investment manufacturing will be achieved by a modular and flexible structural design: a complex 3D skeleton frame of welded tubes, bent with high accuracy using programmed laser cuts will enable the production of different vehicles sharing the same tooling.