Welding is an important part of operations for businesses engaging in material science, asset repairs or simply manufacturing itself. The Industrial Organization for Standards (ISO), has recently developed ISO 2553, a new international standard for welding symbols titled ‘Welding and Allied Processes – Symbolic Representation on Drawings – Welded Joints’.
ISO 2553 is a combination of symbols from the 2 most widely used symbol systems developed by European and Pacific Rim countries. The standard brings together the most widely used technical drawings in the welding field around the world to set a new bar for welding inspection. ISO 2553 represents the 5th edition of welding standards in an attempt to align ISO welding standards and to simplify problems such as elongated holes, joint preparation dimensions, plug welds and figures improvement.
Welding inspection and assessment works best with digital inspection solutions. Without this as a partner, inspection of welding is limited in the amount of data that you can capture effectively and the productivity of the inspection process. Luckily there are now a whole host of paperless inspection solutions available to businesses and organisations engaging in welding activities. Packing features such as offline recording, standardised response checklists and automatically suggested corrective actions, checklists run digitally can dramatically improve data and reduce inspection time. This is of course done whilst raising the inspection quality; inspecting digitally takes advantage of the features on mobile devices such as the camera and touchscreen to transform the inspection process. Data can be captured via RFID scanning of barcodes or taking pictures of welding equipment to later annotate using the touchscreen. Simple behaviour changes in the inspection process can make a large difference to strategic decision-making, asset life length and organisational productivity.
