This study deals with the e ect of locator positioning in the 3-2-1 locating scheme to control the out-of-plane distortion in gas tungsten arc welding of sheet metals. To apply this locating scheme to the sheet metals, a suitable xture was designed. The distortion of the welded plates was predicted using the Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network. To gather the experimental data employed in the RBF modeling process, a set of welding tests was performed on the sheet specimens by varying the positions of the three locators. The parameters of the network were optimally selected using the Simulated Annealing (SA) optimization algorithm. The average and maximum errors computed for the test dataset were respectively 2.43% and 5.30% while in some cases, the error fell below 1%. The results of the RBF network showed very good agreement with the experiments and it can be concluded that this modeling technique can be utilized successfully in predicting the welding distortions when the 3-2-1 locating scheme is used.
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