`Caterpillar earthmoving machinery fatigue study`

Caterpillar's multi-decade, multi-hundred-million-dollar program to develop welding procedures (torch angle, weave pattern, pulse current, robotic consistency) that produce weld profiles good enough to gain fatigue benefit from higher-strength steels (50 ksi → 60–70 ksi HSLA). Tom consulted briefly; most work is proprietary.

He worked on this fifty years ago. But five or ten years ago, Caterpillar — one of the larger welding companies that does more welding than most others in this country, they're the ones in Peoria, they employ five thousand welders in Peoria, Illinois — Caterpillar was having a big study, because their earthmoving machinery is fatigue loaded, right, big heavy welds, fatigue loaded. They were trying to get welding procedures that would give a nice profile that would improve the fatigue strength, because they're fatigue-strength limited. They'd like to use higher-strength steels but as they try to go to higher-strength steels they couldn't get the benefit in fatigue. So this was a major program for Caterpillar. A lot of proprietary work. They came to see me a couple of times and I said good luck. But they have had some luck. If you spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a problem you can make some progress. Most of it's proprietary.