LASER-WELDING WITH FILLER WIRE

New applications such as welding of material combinations and the abil ity to fill opening gaps between the workpieces offer new prospects fo r laser beam welding processes with filler wire. To guarantee good qua lity, vertical distance variations between wire tip and weld pool are, above all, not permissible as this causes globular metal transfer and would accordingly result in strongly rippled, unclean welds. A proces s-internal signal, recorded by a sensor, helps to solve this problem. The automatic tracking of the vertical wire position is possible on-li ne via a controller. In this way, the running process can be optimized and a consistently good weld quality can be achieved.