Abstract
On-line monitoring and control of laser welding process play an important role in welding quality assessment. The morphology of molten pool during welding process influences welding quality. Volume, tilt, and height were characteristics of molten pool, but they cannot be measured directly during the welding process. An experiment of surfacing weld of Type 304 austenitic stainless steel with high-power disk laser welding was implemented. An active vision system with an auxiliary laser light source was designed to acquire the images of molten pool and its shadow during the welding process. The images were pre-processed to analyze the characteristics of the casting shadow of molten pool instead of analyzing the characteristics of the molten pool itself. The area, maximal distance between the shadow and keyhole, maximal width, and the tilt of the shadow were selected as the characteristics to analyze the relationship between the morphology of molten pool and welding quality by linear and 10th non-linear fitting. The results indicated that the welding quality could be dynamically detected by observing these characteristics. A different welding process was also conducted to confirm the proposed method. The research in this paper provides a method for on-line monitoring and control during high-power disk laser welding.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Katayama S, Kawahito Y (2008) Laser direct joining of metal and plastic. SCRIPTA MATER 59(12):1247–1250
Magnus R, Christine M, Wilhelm P (2010) Laser micro-welding of aluminum alloys experimental studies and numerical modeling. INT J ADV MANUF TECH 50:207–215. doi:10.1007/s00170-009-2510-0
Gao XD, You DY, Katayama S (2012) Infrared image recognition for seam tracking monitoring during fiber laser welding. MECHATRONICS 22(4):370–380
Gao XD, You DY, Katayama S (2012) Seam tracking monitoring based on adaptive Kalman filter embedded Elman neural network during high power fiber laser welding. IEEE Transactions On Industrial Electronics 59(11):4315–4325
Sun XF, Shehab E, Mehnen J (2013) Knowledge modelling for laser beam welding in the aircraft industry. INT J ADV MANUF TECH 66(5–8):763–774
Satoh G, Yao YL, Qiu CA (2013) Strength and microstructure of laser fusion-welded Ti-SS dissimilar material pair. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 66(1–4):469–479
Xi ZL, Guo PT, Xue YY, Huang CH, Li ZW (2010) Investigation of the plasma bursting process in short pulsed laser induced film damage. Acta Phys Sin-Ch Ed 59:3523–3530
Salzburger HJ, Dobmann G, Mohrbacher H (2001) Quality control of laser welds of tailored blanks using guided waves and EMATs. IEE Proceedings-Science, Measurement And Technology 148(4):143–148. doi:10.1049/ip-smt:20010534
Meng C, Lu FG, Cui HC, Tang XH (2013) Research on formation and stability of keyhole in stationary laser welding on aluminum MMCs reinforced with particles. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 67(9–12):2917–2925
Huang QJ (2008) Radiation mechanism of pulsed laser ablation of metal AI. Acta Phys Sin-Ch Ed 57:2314–2319
Gao XD, Zhong XG, You DY, Katayama S (2013) Kalman filtering compensated by radial basis function neural network for seam tracking of laser welding. IEEE Transactions On Control Systems Technology 21(5):1916–1923
Hamidinejad SM, Hasanniya MH, Salari N, Valizadeh E (2013) CO2 laser welding of interstitial free galvanized steel sheets used in tailor welded blanks. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 64(1–4):195–206
Wang HX, Chen X (2002) Determination of the weld pool dimensions in laser welding using a energy balance approach. Journal Of Engineering Thermophysics 23:153–156
Liu ZM, Wang XJ, Wu CS (2010) Numerical simulation and vision-based sensing of key-holing process in plasma arc welding. Transactions Of Jwri 39(2):14–16
Huang W, Kovacevic R (2012) Development of a real-time laser-based machine vision system to monitor and control welding processes. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 63(1–4):235–248
Beersiek J (2001) A CMOS camera as a tool for process analysis not only for laser beam welding. Proc Of 20th International Congress on Application of Lasers & Electro-Optics 90:1185–1193
Wu ZG, Wang YJ (2010) An image enhancement algorithm based on histogram nonlinear transform. Acta Photonica Sinica 39(4):755–758
Shao Y, Wang ZZ, Zhang YM (2011) Monitoring of liquid droplets in laser-enhanced GMAW. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 57:203–214. doi:10.1007/s00170-011-3266-x
Gao CB, Zhou JL, Hu JR, Lang FN (2011) Edge detection of colour image based on quaternion fractional differential. IET Image Process 5(3):261–272
Jiang JA, Chuang CL, Lu YL, Fahn CS (2007) Mathematical-morphology-based edge detectors for detection of thin edges in low-contrast regions. IET Image Process 1(3):269–277
Gao XD, Ding DK, Bai TX, Katayama S (2011) Weld pool image centroid algorithm for seam tracking vision model in arc welding process. IET Image Process 5(5):410–419
Gao XD, Wang RL, Long GF, Katayama S (2012) Study of characteristics of plume based on hue-saturation-intensity during high-power disk laser welding. Acta Phys Sin-Ch Ed 61:14810301–14810308
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, Y., Gao, X. Analysis of characteristics of molten pool using cast shadow during high-power disk laser welding. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 70, 1979–1988 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-013-5442-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-013-5442-7