Exhaust and catalyst control with AI — clean welds, exact weight and Euro 6/7 with no surprises.

The problem

Two invisible defects: the bead with a pore and the washcoat that comes up a little short.

The exhaust+catalyst assembly concentrates two defects that sampling does not see and that hit the end customer hard:

1. The exhaust pipe weld — MIG/MAG or laser robots on stainless steel, complex geometry, quality determined by speed, current and torch positioning. A bead with a pore or lack of penetration lets gas escape before the catalyst — the part passes the manufacturer's test and fails the end customer's after a few thousand kilometers.
2. The washcoat with precious metals — the dispersion of platinum, palladium and rhodium onto the ceramic monolith is the functional and economic heart of the catalyst. Dosing is controlled by weight per part. A small variation: either the catalyst does not meet Euro 6/7 and comes back, or you are giving away precious metal part after part for a whole batch.
3. The canning — the monolith is enclosed in its metal shell with a fiber mat that has to end up compressed within its pressure window. Too loose and it shifts; too tight and it cracks. It passes the visual check and fails the leak test.
4. Traceability — the OEM and Euro 6/7 type approval require a file per VIN: which weld, which washcoat weight, which leak test result. Rebuilding it by hand when there is an incident is a week of the quality team's time.

The classic system (sampling + final test + weekly report) leaves the process manager in the dark about the precious metal balance until month-end — and by then the batches have already shipped, and if dosing was running high, so has the money.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN cross-references the bead, the weight and the leak test — without asking you to change anything.

Exhaust and catalyst control does not fail for lack of equipment: it fails because the welding robot data, the washcoat weighing data and the leak test data each live on their own island. iLEAN acts as the putty that fills those cracks without asking you to change robots, washcoat equipment or MES.

Edge sees every bead. Connect reads weight per part and leak test at second zero. The agent cross-references with the precious metal bath batch and builds the Euro 6/7 file per VIN. The person signs — never the other way round.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to exhaust and catalyst control:

• Edge — a machine vision terminal (CNN) over the exhaust pipe welding line. It inspects 100% of the beads after each robot: porosity, lack of penetration, undercut, crater. It acts on the ejector in milliseconds. It works with no network.
• Connect — captures the weight per part after washcoat (integrated scale or equipment panel), the Pt/Pd/Rh bath batch from delivery notes/email, the welding robot parameters (Fanuc, Kuka, ABB) over OPC-UA, and the leak test result. It unifies all of it at second zero.
• Agents — continuously cross-reference the bead, the washcoat weight, the bath batch, the calcination curve and the leak test. They spot drift in precious metal dosing before month-end close, and they build the Euro 6/7 file per VIN ready for IATF 16949 audit and for type approval.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Control in islands vs. cross-referenced control with iLEAN

Aspect	Classic control (each machine on its own island)	With iLEAN Edge + Connect + Agents
Exhaust pipe weld	Sampling + final test	100% inspected in line by Edge, milliseconds
Washcoat weight with Pt/Pd/Rh	Balance at month-end close	Captured part by part, drift caught within hours
Canning and leak tightness	Final test, not cross-referenced with the weld	Cross-referenced by the agent with the bead and weight of the same batch
Euro 6/7 traceability per VIN	Manual reconstruction when an incident hits	Automatic file, continuously
Operation with no network	n/a	Edge keeps inspecting on the light from the panel
OEM audit / type approval	Cold defense	Data ready, the conversation with the OEM changes

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Tier 1 plant with several robotic exhaust welding cells + washcoat + canning + leak test, European OEM under Euro 6/7 and IATF 16949.
• Edge pilot in one welding cell + Connect reading washcoat weight per part and the leak test + an agent that cross-references with the bath batch and builds the Euro 6/7 file per VIN. First value expected within a few weeks.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months. Two hard levers: precious metal savings from fine-tuning the washcoat + reduction of Euro 6/7 returns from the OEM.
• Reduction of out-of-window beads against the baseline typically ≥30% — to be confirmed after measuring the "before".

And the OEM standard

The automotive quality standard for critical components sits on the order of 25 PPM^[1]. For an emissions component under type approval, holding that without cross-referencing weld, washcoat weight and test is not viable in the medium term. AI in anchored tasks (classifying a bead against the catalog, reading a weight and comparing it with the window) has error rates below 1.5% in the best models^[2], and even so it does not decide alone — it holds and asks for a human signature.

^[1] Symestic — automotive quality standard on the order of 25 PPM for critical components.

^[2] OpenAI paper “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.

Related topics in automotive: Radiator and heat exchanger control · Jidoka in robotic welding · Fuel tank control.