SWANTEC ApS

General: SWANTEC (Scientific Welding And Numerical TEChnology) was founded on 1 June 1999 as a spin-off private limited company resulted from many years research and development in RSW and metal forming at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Its core business is to develop and commercialise professional welding software for simulation and optimisation of resistance welding and related processes, and to provide consulting service to manufacturing industry. The company is located in Lyngby, 10 km north of Copenhagen.

Expertise: An in depth understanding of the RSW process has enabled SWANTEC to develop SORPAS(R) - a dedicated professional software for simulation and optimisation of resistance welding processes. SWANTEC’s corresponding expertise includes numerical simulations in addition to extensive knowledge of RSW and materials behaviour. This encompasses nearly all commonly used metals, consumables and welding machine specifications.

Role in project: The breadth and depth of knowledge available to SWANTEC will be combined with the expertise at TWI in specifying the performance of the SmartDress system and defining the operating characteristics of the tip dress control system. By supplying data on current industry standard materials/consumables and parameters, SWANTEC will support the production of representative degraded consumables (for the other RTDs) as part of WP1.

Benefits expected: The next generation of SWANTEC modelling software is planned to extend the scope of the product to include predictions on electrode tip performance and lifetime; as a function of consumables used and parameters adopted. This will be one of the key outputs of TWI during WP1; enabling SWANTEC to extend the performance of their products maintaining their client base, and extending their consultancy support business to new customers. This is expected to generate a gross profit of €4M (5 years post project).

Key personnel: Wenqi Zhang established SWANTEC in 1999 for the development and commercialization of simulation software for resistance welding. He possesses a key understanding of the range of data available to support WP1; together the work package outputs needed to extend the performance of the next generation of SORPAS software.