Product Code: ICAL05_1801

Experimental Observations of the Laser Keyhole Welding Process of AA5182
Authors:
Benno Aalderink, NIMR/University of Twente CTW-WA; Enschede Netherlands
Presented at ICALEO 2005

For the laser keyhole welding process of Aluminium Tailor Welded Blanks, monitoring systems are in many cases vital to ensure a certain weld quality. Especially process visualization with camera based systems gives a lot of insight. Although for steel it has already been demonstrated that real-time images can be obtained from the laser welding process using these cameras based on silicon chips, for Aluminium this turns out to be problematic. The light emitted by the weld plume hides the weld pool from the coaxially mounted camera.
In this paper recent experiments are discussed in which an illumination source is used during the laser keyhole welding process of AA5182. It appeared to be possible to significantly reduce the influence of the light emitted by the weld plume and to reveal the weld pool for the camera. It is expected that these results will give a new impulse to the development of a camera based observation system for the laser keyhole welding process of Aluminium.