Industrial process development
For welding, cutting and surface treatment
We already have 20 years of application experience and are therefore the right partner to develop the right process for your application. While new developments usually take place in-house, development and optimization work on existing processes is carried out directly at the customer's site.
As part of a feasibility study, we determine which laser process has the prospect of success in solving your task. Afterwards we plan together with you the next steps, carry out detailed examinations and analyzes, which we evaluate according to the given boundary conditions. The results are used to streamline existing processes or plan new investments, ensuring a seamless transition to production. Thanks to our flexible options for laser use, depending on the volume of production, a suitable model can be selected: rent, used laser, new machine - all from one source.
Applications
Welding aluminum alloys poses a number of challenges due to the combination of material properties. The ever-present oxide skin and the high reflectivity require a high laser intensity to melt the material. At the same time a high welding speed is required because of the good heat conduction in conjunction with the low viscosity of the melt to keep the molten bath volume low. Especially with sheet thicknesses of 1mm or less, the process window is due to the o.g. Properties already very small. If component tolerances are added which prevent a zero gap between the joining partners, it may no longer be possible to reproducibly weld with seam properties that meet the requirements.
LASER on demand therefore uses a special look, in which the melt pool size and weld width can be controlled independently of each other. This also allows the welding of aluminum sheets of 1mm thickness or less without the use of filler material. In this way, e.g. For an application in racing complex liquid containers successfully welded and the tightness of the welds subsequently verified by means of pressure testing.
Prototypes, large and special components are our specialty. Thus, the plan of our customer FAUST ApS to use a low-distortion joining technology for the prototype of a heat exchanger boiler was also implemented. 450m of laser weld are stuck in the lateral surface of the component.
For the production of a heat exchanger boiler, 150 steel tubes with intervening sheets of 6mm thickness were to be welded. Due to the geometry, only a one-sided accessibility should be required, whereby a through-penetration with notch root development was required.
LASER on demand solved the task by means of laser beam deep welding using a large field robot. Precise edge preparation and adherence to a predefined welding sequence minimized distortion and dispensed with the use of filler material. The use of a seam tracking sensor simplified programming and made it possible to track the robot path in a tight tolerance band along the joining edge, thus ensuring high process reliability.
Welding stainless steel structures using conventional welding methods (MIG or TIG) often leads to significant component distortion. This is particularly critical when relatively thin sheet metal parts are to be connected with milled parts of larger cross section. For the special coating machines of BASF Catalysts Germany GmbH, however, distortion-free tools are absolutely necessary for the different dimensions of the substrates to be coated.
LASER on demand solved the task by means of laser beam deep welding. Due to the concentrated energy input in the range of some zenhtelmillimetern diameter, a high welding speed is achieved. The process is characterized by narrow welds with great depth, whereby the heat influence of the component and is low and low distortion welding is possible. Thus, the joining of the entire sheet metal cross-section takes place with only one-sided accessibility. With a correspondingly accurate component preparation, it is possible to completely dispense with the use of additional material, so that no seam overhanging occurs and the method is thus practically free of reworking.
