What is laser welding? What is the current development of laser welding technology? What are the applications of laser welding technology?

What is laser welding?

Simply put, laser welding is to heat the surface of the workpiece with laser radiation, the surface heat spreads to the interior through heat conduction, and then by controlling the parameters such as the width, energy, peak power and repetition frequency of the laser pulse, the workpiece melts to form a specific molten pool, thus realizing welding.

Laser welding reduces the amount of heat input to the minimum required, the range of metallurgical changes in the heat-affected zone is small, and the deformation caused by heat conduction is also minimized.

Non-contact welding minimizes tool wear and distortion. The laser beam is easy to focus, align and be guided by optical instruments, and can be placed at an appropriate distance from the workpiece, and can be guided around the workpiece between equipment or obstacles.

The laser beam can be focused on a very small area, allowing welding of small and closely spaced parts, a wide range of weldable materials, and the joining of various heterogeneous materials.

High-speed welding is easily automated and can be digitally or computerized. When welding thin materials or fine diameter wires, there are no problems such as backfusion.

Current laser welding technology in various fields of application

Laser for welding is not later than cutting. At present, China has been professionally engaged in laser welding enterprises, the early lamp pump laser, YAG laser welding, are very traditional low-power laser welding. There are applications in several fields such as molds, advertising letters, glasses, jewelry, etc. The scale is very limited. In recent years, with the continuous improvement of laser power, more importantly, semiconductor lasers, fiber lasers gradually developed laser welding application scenarios, breaking the original laser welding technology bottleneck, opened up a new market space.

Application of laser welding technology in automotive manufacturing

With the development of science and technology as well as the people's consumption level, quality of life improvement, automobile production field of automobile body lightweight as well as the car body of the art of aesthetics of the requirements of more and more high, laser welding technology owns its processing effect is excellent, product quality is good, the efficiency of the work of the advantages of high stand out, thus quickly becoming the automobile production field welding process technology applications.

In the vehicle production, laser welding technology is mainly used in the thick steel plate laser welding, automobile assembly and sub-system assembly laser group welding, laser welding of vehicle parts and other processes. Some European and American car manufacturers on the application of laser welding technology started earlier, began in the 1980s, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and other familiar automotive brands then began to introduce laser welding technology into the vehicle production and manufacturing, and promote the laser welding technology in the field of vehicle manufacturing in-depth use and development.

Power battery laser welding should be the brightest welding application needs in recent years, followed by auto body, parts welding, China is the world's largest automotive market, many veteran car companies, new car companies continue to emerge, with nearly a hundred car brands. For example, China's FAW, Chery, GAC Honda, etc. have been used in automated laser welding production line; China's Tangshan locomotives, China's Qingdao Sifang locomotives have also been used in the kilowatt welding technology; in the power battery more, Ningde Times, AVIC lithium-ion, BYD, Guoxuan and other head of the enterprise are a large number of laser welding equipment.

After more than half a century of development, laser welding technology also towards the increasingly perfect, and has been gradually in more and more industrial fields in a wide range of applications. In the aerospace, electronic instrumentation, machinery manufacturing, iron and steel metallurgy, automobile manufacturing, medical equipment and other industry applications, laser welding technology plays an increasingly huge function.