mainline products. “You need to ease into some novel areas and then, once it has proven itself, [manufac- turers] can trust it and use it more broadly,” he said. “That has happened in transmissions and in car seats. Eight years ago, no one was really using laser remote welding for car seats and now almost all suppliers are doing it. Why? Because they trust it,” he said. He also pointed out that for select industries and applications, laser welding has reached a certain maturity, like tailor-welded blanks, drive train, and medical components. Costs for lasers have de- creased, but he sees that cost-curve fl attening in the last couple of years. Nevertheless, he predicts both hybrid and remote welding applications will expand, replacing other welding methods. “Sweeping a laser beam from spot to spot is much faster than moving a resistance weld gun between spots even as the welds themselves take about the same,” he said. Therefore, for the same number of spot welds, that means faster cycle times and higher throughput.
Machine Tool Approach to Laser Systems “Welding once was background noise compared to laser cutting, which is where the majority of sys- tems were sold,” said Mark Barry, vice president sales & marketing of Prima Power Laserdyne (Champlin, MN). “But about fi ve years ago, we began to see an expansion in laser welding applications.” From a negligible slice of their business, he has seen welding grow to about 25%. Laserdyne special- izes in delivering turnkey class 1 laser installations that provide all of the stable movement and control of an accurate machine tool. Customers include turbine, high-precision medical device, and electronics de-
Hybrid welding, combining
GMAW with high-power lasers, is also suitable for automation, as shown here.
vice manufacturers. He attributes two reasons for the growth of laser welding: the nature of the parts and the availability of effi cient and economical fi ber lasers. “The parts we deal with today are more often near-net shape. We are joining fi nished parts togeth- er,” he said. These highly machined, high-value parts already have the tight fi t-up needed for an autogenous process. They also need a process that minimizes distortion—ideal for laser welding. The fi ber lasers Laserdyne incorporates into its
machines are providing an ideal and convenient laser source to meet the needs for precision welding. The fi ber delivery means an output beam source that is evenly distributed as a top-hat (as opposed to a peak Gaussian distribution), with the advantage of low divergence. Even with the advent of fi ber lasers, laser weld- ing capital expense costs can be relatively high but are offset by many advantages. As Barry found out from an extensive review with existing customers, capital cost was not the most important buying factor. The factors that matter include good process con- trol; high-quality welds; robust operation with high uptime; and ease of use by operators not expert in lasers. “Fiber lasers when employed correctly are easy to use and easy to teach people to use,” he said. “They
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