Process-reliable welding of thick plates in shipbuilding

Welding Multi-laser beam welding process reduces manufacturing costs

2024-07-26 Source: LZH | Translated by AI 2 min Reading Time

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LZH is researching how to make the welding of thick plates in shipbuilding more process-reliable. To this end, the scientists are developing a multi-laser beam welding process with adapted beam shaping and a "Digital Twin"-based integrated quality assurance.

Laser beam welding processes can also be used to join large steel plate thicknesses up to 30 millimeters.(Image: LZH) — Laser beam welding processes can also be used to join large steel plate thicknesses up to 30 millimeters.
(Image: LZH)

Welding in the thick plate range is challenging due to the high penetration depths. LZH researchers want to simplify the welding of thick-walled components in the 15 mm to 30 mm range with a novel multi-laser beam welding process with integrated quality assurance.

Digital twin improves process monitoring

With the help of integrated quality assurance, the scientists want to ensure a consistent, defect-free, and high welding seam quality. For this purpose, they will combine different sensors, with which they can capture features regarding the characterization of the welding joints, such as seam height, seam width, and distortion. Based on these data, they develop an adaptive welding process control and an integrated quality assurance system, with which the welding seam quality can be classified as "in order" and "not in order".

Additionally, LZH transfers the sensor data from the quality assurance system into digital twins, which digitally map the process and welding seam based on the various measured data. With the digital twin, the researchers can document and trace the process. The goal is to reduce overall error rates in automated welding in shipbuilding and necessary component inspections in production, making the manufacturing process more cost-effective.

Multi-laser beam welding conserves resources

In order to be able to weld qualitatively high-quality and crack-free even at material thicknesses of up to 30 mm, the researchers are developing a multi-laser beam welding process for the thick plate range. For this, they are combining three beam sources into a parallel root and fill layer welding process. By adapting the beam shaping, they can specifically influence the formation of the melt pools, temperatures, solidification, and structure in order to avoid hot cracks.

The goal: The developed one-run process with welding depths exceeding the state of the art should also significantly reduce welding seam layers, manufacturing time, additional material, and protective gas consumption. As a result, resources can be conserved and manufacturing costs can be reduced. Both the processes to be developed and the innovative system technology are later to be transferred into industrial manufacturing plants in the maritime sector.

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