Fakultät Maschinenbau
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Absorber-free laser transmission welding enables clean and precise joining of plastics without additives or adhesives. It is therefore well suited to produce optical and medical devices, which place high demands on cleanliness and accuracy.
However, the weld usually has an undesirably large vertical expansion, causing bulges and distortion. To improve this, the intensity distribution of the laser beam as well as the processing strategy must be adapted. Due to the complexity, this is aided by process simulation. However, simulation parameter calibration and verification are usually done considering the seam width and height, which is of limited significance. To overcome this, we propose a new method for image processing of microtome sections, determining the spatially resolved geometry of the weld. Thus, the deviation between experiment and simulation can be calculated pixel by pixel. This spatially resolved value is predestined for the calibration of the simulation parameters: For a parameter field with 18 different settings, the total deviation between experiment and simulation is less than 11 % after calibration.
Thermo-mechanical simulation offers great opportunities to optimize welding processes of plastics. For realistic simulation, the temperature dependent mechanical properties need to be implemented from ambient temperature to temperatures above the flow temperature. Standard test methods are insufficient for characterization in the entire temperature range because close to the flow temperature the material is too soft for tensile tests and too stiff for rheometry. Therefore, an optimization strategy is developed, that determines unknown material parameters by testing in welding simulations. The unknown parameters are iteratively adjusted to minimize the mismatch between computed and measured set-paths. Thus, important process characteristics are calculated realistically, enabling the computer aided assessment of the weld quality.