June 1997: Engineering By Design, of San Jose CA, developed an automatic system to precisely finish fillet welds inside piping supports required to replace a damaged reactor shroud. The high radiation environment made hand finishing impossible and the extreme environment conditions made the machinery design a challenge. Special materials and custom miniaturize drive systems were used to position a carbide cutting burr across the weld area in a path that matched the wall radius and the flat support. The curved intersection line of the joined surfaces was detected through electrical contact with 3 points on each part and then the cutter path was generated using advanced geometry calculations. This is the same plant that was destroyed by the tsunami in 2012.
