Up to 30 millimeters Optimize welding of thick plates

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Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V.

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At the Laser Center Hanover, a multi-laser beam welding process with beam shaping and an integrated quality assurance based on a digital twin is being developed for joining thick plates.

Welding in the thick plate range—for example for shipbuilding—is challenging due to the high welding depths. However, researchers from LZH want to facilitate the welding of thick-walled components in the 15 to 30 millimeter range with a novel multi-laser beam welding process with integrated quality assurance. With integrated quality assurance, they also want to ensure consistent, defect-free, and high seam welding quality. They plan to combine various sensors with which features concerning the characterization of the welds can be recorded. These include the seam protrusion, the seam width, and the distortion. Based on this data, an adaptive welding process control and an integrated quality assurance system are to be developed, with which the seam welding quality can be classified with "okay" and "not okay".

Join thick plates with digital twin and multi-laser beam

Additionally, LZH transfers the sensor data of the quality assurance system into digital twins. These will digitally map the process and welded seam based on various measurement data. With the digital twin, LZH researchers can then document and trace the process. The goal is to reduce overall error rates in automated welding in shipbuilding and necessary component inspections in production, thus making the entire manufacturing process more economical. To be able to weld with high quality and therefore crack-free even at material strengths up to 30 millimeters, a multi-laser beam welding process is used. For this, experts combine three beam sources into a parallel running root and fill layer welding process. By beam shaping, they can specifically influence the formation of the melt pools, temperatures, solidification, and the structure to avoid hot cracks.

Welding depths that go beyond today's standards

The ultimate goal is the one-run process, with welding depths exceeding the state of technology. This should also significantly reduce weld seam layers, manufacturing time, additional material and shielding gas consumption. This naturally conserves resources and manufacturing costs. Both the processes to be developed and the novel system technology are to be later transferred to industrial manufacturing facilities in the maritime sector.

The subproject "Digital Twin"-based quality assurance and adaptive process control in multi-laser beam welding" is part of the joint project "Multi-laser beam welding processes with "Digital Twin"-based quality assurance for maritime applications on thick plates" ("DIGIMAR"). In addition to LZH, the project partners are Meyer Werft GmbH & Co. KG (integration of system technology and process development) and Laserline GmbH (multi-laser beam source and combined processing optics). Everything is supported by the project sponsor Jülich with funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (funding identification number 03SX617C).