Abstract
Weld bead shape is an important measure for evaluation of weld quality. Many welding parameters have influence on the weld bead shape. The quantitative relationship between welding parameters and bead shape, however, is not determined yet because of their high complexity and many unknown factors. Fuzzy expert system is an advanced expert system which uses fuzzy rules and approximate reasoning. It is a vert useful tool for welding technology because is can process rationally the uncertain and inexact information such as the welding information. In this paper, the empirical and the qualitative relationship between welding parameters and bead shape are analyzed and represented by fuzzy rules. They are converted to the quantitative relationship by use of approximate reasoning of fuzzy expert system. Weld bead shape is estimated from the welding parameters using fuzzy expert system. The result of comparison between measured values of weld bead by welding experiments and the estimates values by fuzzy expert system shows a good consistancy.