FEATURE: SHIPBUILDING
LASER INNOVATIONS FOR THE MARITIME SECTOR
Keely Portway looks at how new laser technologies are optimising welding and cutting for shipbuilding
After a relatively slow period between 2019 and 2020, the market for shipbuilding is steadily picking up, and, according to research firm Statista, is likely to grow from this year onwards, surpassing $160bn in 2023.
And the Ship Building Global
Market Report 2021: Covid-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030 from
ResearchAndMarkets.com would appear to agree, predicting that the market will reach $186.6bn by 2025, thanks largely to companies rearranging their operations and recovering from the impact of the pandemic. Other factors include the increasing
seaborne trade, rising population, surging purchasing power of consumers and the improving standards of living increasing the demand for consumer goods. In terms of markets, Europe is cited as crucial for the production of cruise vessels, however it is East Asia that is dominant in shipbuilding, with China, Japan and South Korea being the largest shipbuilding nations. According to Statista, China alone received 48 per cent of global shipbuilding orders in 2020.
The industry has certainly had its challenges over the last few years, pandemic-aside, with a shortage of skilled workers and various environmental regulations and policies changing the way that ships are built. Add to this the period
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of decline last year and the shipbuilding industry is becoming more reliant on quality, efficiency and accuracy than ever before. Enter stage-left, the laser! Laser cutting and welding are known for their high-precision and efficiency, so it’s little surprise that they are a mainstay of the shipbuilding industry.
100kW shipbuilding laser Eyal Shekel, CEO at Civan Lasers, believes there is room to increase the use of lasers for cutting and welding in the sector, due to their ability to increase process efficiency. ‘It’s beneficial, for example, to be able to weld an outer panel just from the outside, instead of having to go both inside and outside. Being able to produce a high- quality, relatively fast weld on one side is a very big advantage,’ he said. In terms of some of the most common
uses for lasers in shipbuilding, Shekel highlighted the structure as a key area. ‘Particularly the T-joints and sealing welds,’ he said, ‘they present opportunities for laser welding. In general, we feel that with laser welding, and particularly with a high-power
single-mode laser, you can perform quickly and accurately, even on thick materials.’ He added that the narrow beam of such a laser enables it to efficiently weld the very shallow angles of T-joints. The company recently launched its 100kW single-mode, continuous-wave (CW) coherent beam combining (CBC) fibre laser, which Shekel said lends itself well to this purpose. The CBC technology is based on parallel amplification of a single seed signal that allows for coherent recombination, ramping the output power to a degree unobtainable by in-series amplifiers. Its dynamic beam shaping technology offers the ability to control beam shape, frequency, sequence and focus steering. Power is a key point for Shekel, who highlighted 10kW or higher as the standout power needed for shipbuilding applications. ‘We now have 30kW and also 100kW available,’ he said. ‘The advantage is mainly in quality, because the more power you have, the faster you can go but when you’re trying to go faster without the higher power, you get the lower quality welds.’
Steel processing firm Otto Klostermann uses a LaserMat II system from Messer Cutting Systems for XXL formats
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Messer Cutting Systems
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