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The present work is devoted to the numerical analysis of the high-power laser beam welding of thick sheets at different welding speeds. A three-dimensional transient multi-physics numerical model is developed, allowing for the prediction of the keyhole geometry and the final penetration depth. Two ray tracing algorithms are implemented and compared, namely a standard ray tracing approach and an approach using a virtual mesh refinement for a more accurate calculation of the reflection points. Both algorithms are found to provide sufficient accuracy for the prediction of the keyhole depth during laser beam welding with process speeds of up to 1.5 m/min. However, with the standard algorithm, the penetration depth is underestimated by the model for a process speed of 2.5 m/min due to a trapping effect of the laser energy in the top region. In contrast, the virtually refined ray tracing approach results in high accuracy results for process speeds of both 1.5 m/min and 2.5 m/min. A detailed study on the trapping effect is provided, accompanied by a benchmark including a predefined keyhole geometry with typical characteristics for the high-power laser beam welding of thick plates at high process speed, such as deep keyhole, inclined front keyhole wall, and a hump.
The amount of absorbed energy in the keyhole as well as its spatial and temporal distribution is essential to model the laser beam welding process. The recoil pressure, which develops because of the evaporation process induced by the absorbed laser energy at the keyhole wall, is a key determining factor for the macroscopic flow of the molten metal in the weld pool during high-power laser beam welding. Consequently, a realistic implementation of the effect of laser radiation on the weld metal is crucial to obtain reliable and accurate simulation results. In this paper, we discuss manyfold different improvements on the laser-material interaction, namely, the ray tracing method, in the numerical simulation of the laser beam welding process. The first improvement relates to locating the exact reflection points in the ray tracing method using a so-called cosine condition in the determination algorithm for the intersection of reflected rays and the keyhole surface. A second correction refers to the numerical treatment of the Gaussian distribution of the laser beam, whose beam width is defined by a decay of the laser intensity by a factor of 1/e2, thus ignoring around 14% of the total laser beam energy. In the third step, the changes in the laser radiation distribution in the vertical direction were adapted by using different approximations for the converging and the diverging regions of the laser beam, thus mimicking the beam caustic. Finally, a virtual mesh refinement was adopted in the ray tracing routine. The obtained numerical results were validated with experimental measurements.
Up to now there is no sufficient technique to detect transverse cracks in austenitic and dissimilar welds which recently are of increasing interest in the integrity surveillance of nuclear power plants as well as in quality control of longitudinally welded pipes. Weld inspection by interpretation of single A-scans will lead to erroneous results due to effects caused by anisotropy and in worst case might leave flaws undetected. Therefore, imaging techniques such as the synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) should be used. If the SAFT algorithm is applied on data taken from austenitic welds, the inhomogeneous, anisotropic structure of these welds has to be taken into account in order to properly attribute amplitudes measured in A-scans to the corresponding coordinates in the region of interest. While this has been investigated in the past, all attempts so far were limited to the imaging of longitudinal cracks which requires a less complicated setup than the imaging of transverse cracks. In this paper we give an outline of our attempts to reconstruct images of transverse cracks in different welds. For this purpose a SAFT program based on ray tracing and a layered structure weld model derived from an empirical model of grain orientations in welds are used. The results of the image reconstruction on experimental data are shown and compared to images obtained by assuming an isotropic homogeneous model. Root reflection and crack tip echo are clearly visible which allows an estimation of size and position of the crack with good accuracy.