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Hybrid laser-arc welding of thick-walled ferromagnetic steels with electromagnetic weld pool support
(2018)
The hybrid laser-arc welding (HLAW) process provides many advantages over laser welding and arc welding alone, such as high welding speed, gap bridgeability, and deep penetration. The developments in hybrid laser-arc welding technology using modern high-power lasers allow single-pass welding of thick materials. This technology can be used for the heavy metal industries such as shipbuilding, power plant fabrication, and line-pipe manufacturing. The obvious problem for single-pass welding is the growth of the hydrostatic pressure with increasing thickness of materials leading to drop-out of molten metal. This phenomenon is aggravated at slow welding velocities because of increasing weld seam width followed by a decrease of Laplace pressure compensating the hydrostatic pressure. Therefore, weld pool support is necessary by welding of thick materials with slow welding velocities. The innovative electromagnetic weld pool support system is contactless and has been used successfully for laser beam welding of aluminum alloys and austenitic and ferromagnetic steels. The support system is based on generating Lorentz forces within the weld pool. These are produced by an oscillating magnetic field orientated perpendicular to the welding direction. The electromagnetic weld pool support facilitates a decrease in the welding speed without a sagging and drop-out of the melt thus eliminating the limitations of weldable material thickness.
The laser hybrid welding process offers many advantages regarding deep penetration, increased welding velocity and with the help of the supplied filler wire an improved bridgeability to gap and misalignment tolerances. High power laser systems with a power of approx. 30 kW are already available on the market. Nevertheless, multi-layer technology with an arc process is still used for welding of plates from a thickness from 20 mm. A potential cause is the process instability with increasing laser power. It is inevitable that gravity drop-out due to the high hydrostatic pressure at increasing wall thickness especially at welding in flat position and with a low welding speed. The surface tension decreases with increasing root width resulting from low welding velocities. To prevent such inadmissible defects of the seam a use of weld pool support is required. Usual weld pool support systems such as ceramic or powder supports require a mechanical detachment which is time-consuming. The electromagnetic weld pool support system described in this work shows an alternative weld pool support which works contactless. It is based on generating Lorentz forces in the weld pool due to oscillating magnetic field and induced eddy currents. This innovative technology offers single pass welds up to 28 mm in flat position and reduced welding velocity with a laser power of just 19 kW. It also leads to improved mechanical-technological properties of the seams because of the slow cooling rate. With usage of an electromagnetic weld pool support the limitation of the hybrid laser arc welding process in the thick sheet metal will be extend.
An electromagnetic weld pool support system for 20 mm thick duplex stainless steel AISI 2205 was investigated numerically and compared to experiments. In our former publications, it was shown how an alternating current (AC) magnetic field below the process zone directed perpendicular to the welding direction can induce vertically directed Lorentz forces. These can counteract the gravitational forces and allow for a suppression of material drop-out for austenitic stainless steels and aluminum alloys. In this investigation, we additionally adopted a steady-state complex magnetic permeability model for the consideration of the magnetic hysteresis behavior due to the ferritic characteristics of the material. The model was calibrated against the Jiles–Atherton model. The material model was also successfully tested against an experimental configuration before welding with a 30 mm diameter cylinder of austenitic stainless steel sur-rounded by duplex stainless steel. Thereby, the effects of the Curie temperature on the magnetic characteristics in the vicinity of the later welding zone were simulated. The welding process was modeled with a three-dimensional turbulent steady-state model including heat transfer and fluid dy-namics as well as the electromagnetic field equations. Main physical effects, the thermo-capillary (Marangoni) convection at the weld pool boundaries, the natural convection due to gravity as well as latent heat of solid–liquid phase transitions at the phase boundaries were accounted for in the model. The feedback of the electromagnetic forces on the weld pool was described in terms of the electromagnetic-induced pressure. The finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics 4.2 was used in this investigation. It is shown that the gravity drop-out associated with the welding of 20 mm thick duplex stainless steel plates due to the hydrostatic pressure can be prevented by the application of AC magnetic fields between around 70 and 90 mT. The corresponding oscillation frequencies were between 1 and 10 kHz and the electromagnetic AC powers were between 1 and 2.3 kW. In the experiments, values of the electromagnetic AC power between 1.6 and 2.4 kW at os-cillation frequencies between 1.2 and 2.5 kHz were found to be optimal to avoid melt sagging or drop-out of melt in single pass full-penetration laser beam welding of 15 and 20 mm thick AISI 2205.