General Electric spot weld adaptive control system

GE Lynn contracted GE Schenectady Research at $1M/year for seven years to develop spot welding adaptive control for nickel superalloy combustor cans. Tom hired at $150K as "whipping boys" after Lynn cut Schenectady's funding. Tom and his students discovered the controller wasn't adapting until six cycles after the four-cycle weld was over.

Have I told you the titanium electron beam welding at General Electric? No, okay. This is a similar type of problem. At the time, this was mid 80s, General Electric Lynn up here. They sort of abused me, actually. General Electric Lynn Aircraft Engines had wanted to improve the spot welding. This is where you use two big copper electrodes and you put two pieces of sheet metal between the two electrodes, and you pass 10,000 amps for a third of a second, and you can weld a little button between those two electrodes. It's called a resistance spot weld, invented by Elihu Thomson, who had been president of MIT. He was the co-founder of General Electric with Thomas Edison back around 1900. It's the way they weld all kinds of automobiles. I'm known for having said you need 3,000 spot welds in the average automobile because you need 2,000 good ones. When it's working well it's a very reliable, very fast process. It costs about a nickel to ten cents for every weld that goes in an automobile, because you're just bang — you're making 60 welds a minute on an assembly line, which is incredible. But that's why they get a thousand bad ones out of three thousand.