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- Olsson, Rickard, 1959-
(författare)
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Analysis and Monitoring of Laser Welding and Surface Texturing
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis can be conveniently divided into three sections as follows;Part I. Monitoring of laser welding In laser materials processing there has always been a need for suitable methods to supervise and monitor the processes on-line, to ensure correct production quality or to trigger alarms when failures are detected. Numerous investigations have been made in this field, including experimental and theoretical work. It is common practice in this field to monitor surface temperature, plasma radiation and back-reflected laser light, coaxially with the laser beam. Traditionally, the monitoring systems involved carry out no statistical analysis of the signals received – they merely involve thresholds.The first two papers in this thesis look at the feedback collected during laser welding using a co-axial setup from a Digital Signal Processing point of view and also uses high speed video photography to correlate signal perturbations with process anomalies. Digital signal processing techniques such as Kalman filtering, Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis have been applied to on-line measurement data and have generated new ways to describe laser welding behaviour using parameters such as reflected pulse shape. The limitations of commercially available welding supervision systems have been studied and design suggestions for the next generation of on-line weld monitoring equipment have been formulated.Having progressed from thin section welding with continuous wave lasers to pulsed laser welding, the thesis then moves on to pulsed laser surface melting.Part II Analysis of surface texturing of titanium. The second part of the thesis concentrates on laser structuring of titanium surfaces for medical implants. The two papers in this section present an analysis of the laser-material interactions which create surfaces suitable for osseointegration (bone attachment). The work concentrates on a commercially available surface used for screw implants in dentistry; BioHelix™. This surface is generated by an intense bombardment of laser pulses and the surface is thus disrupted during solidification. The formation of various levels and types of roughness are analysed and it is noted that laser generated rough surfaces are fundamentally different from those with a mechanically produced roughness. One key point is that laser generated rough surfaces can include overhanging features. This finding lead to the research carried out in part III of the thesis.Part III. Analysis and classification of laser generated surfaces.The final section of the thesis presents research which uses statistical techniques to identify whether or not a roughened surface includes overhanging features. The presence or otherwise of such features is important because they can affect the wettability of surfaces and thus their suitability for implant surfaces, adhesive bonding and lubrication etc. Micro Computer Tomography was used to generate a typical cross section of the surface under investigation. At equally spaced positions the profile of this cross section is then allocated vectors which are normal to the profile at each point. The angles of the vectors can then be analyzed to reveal the presence or otherwise of overhanging features. The presence of overhangs on the material surface is indicated by the existence of normal vectors with angles that exceed 180°. The papers in this section also investigate possibilities and limitations of using statistical methods in conjunction with Micro Computer Tomography.The papers have in common processing of data for laser materials processing, by advanced methods to identify and extract essential information from the processes and the resulting material properties.
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| 2. |
- Pocorni, Jetro, 1988-
(författare)
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Laser cutting and piercing: Experimental and theoretical investigation
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis concerns experimental investigations of laser cutting and piercing, with theoretical and practical discussions of the results. The thesis is made up of an introduction to laser cutting and six scientific Papers. These Papers are linked in such a way that each of them studies a different aspect of laser cutting: process efficiency in Paper I, morphology and melt flow on the laser cut front in Papers II, III and IV and laser piercing in Papers V and VI.Paper I investigates the effect of material type, material thickness, laser wavelength, and laser power on the efficiency of the cutting process for industrial state-of-the-art CO2 and fibre laser cutting machines. Here the cutting efficiency is defined in its most fundamental terms: as the area of cut edge created per Joule of laser energy.In Paper II a new experimental technique is presented which has been developed to enable high speed imaging of laser cut fronts produced using standard, commercial parameters. The results presented here suggest that the cut front produced when cutting 10 mm thick medium section stainless steel with a fibre laser and a nitrogen assist gas is covered in humps which themselves are covered in a thin layer of liquid. Paper III presents numerical simulations of the melt flow on a fibre laser ablation-driven processing front during remote fusion cutting, RFC. The simulations were validated with high speed imaging observations of the processing front. The simulation results provide explanations of the main liquid transport mechanisms on the processing front, based on information on the temperature, velocity and pressure fields involved. The results are of fundamental relevance for any process governed by a laser ablation induced front. In Paper IV cutting fronts created by CO2 and fibre lasers in stainless steel at thicknesses between 2 mm and 10 mm have been ‘frozen’ and their geometry has been measured. The resulting three-dimensional shapes have been curve fitted as ninth order polynomials. Various features of the cutting front geometry are discussed, including the lack of correlation of the cut front inclination with either the relevant Brewster angle or the inclination of the striations on the cut edge. In this paper, mathematical descriptions of the cutting fronts are obtained, which can be used as input parameters by any researcher in the field of laser cutting simulations.Paper V investigates the subject of laser piercing. Before any cut is started the laser needs to pierce the material. In this paper the laser piercing process is investigated using a wide range of laser pulse parameters, for stainless steel using a fibre laser. The results reveal the influence of pulse parameters on pierce time and pierced hole diameter. A high speed imaging camera was used to time the penetration event and to study the laser-material interactions involved in drilling the pierced holes. In Paper VI a ‘dynamic’ or ‘moving beam’, laser piercing technique is introduced for processing 15 mm thick stainless steel. One important aspect of laser piercing is the reliability of the process because industrial laser cutting machines are programmed for the minimum reliable pierce time. In this work a comparison was made between a stationary laser and a laser which moves along a circular trajectory with varying processing speeds. High speed imaging was employed during the piercing process to understand melt behavior inside the pierce hole.Throughout this work experimental techniques, including advanced high speed imaging, have been used in conjunction with simulations and theoretical analysis, to provide new knowledge for understanding and improving laser beam cutting and its associated piercing process.
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| 3. |
- Sundqvist, Jesper
(författare)
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Aspects of Heat Flow in Laser Processing of Metals
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since the laser was invented in 1960, its use in manufacturing industry has been growing rapidly. Laser processing of metals is based on the flow of heat that is generated by the absorbed laser beam. One outstanding aspect of laser beams is high precision along with high controllability of energy transfer, which includes creative techniques of shaping the beam and in turn the process. The thesis presents six Papers A-F on different metal processing techniques, namely welding, hardening and cutting, the latter combined with additive manufacturing. For each respective technique it was studied how desired properties can be optimized by controlled use of the laser beam and in turn of the temperature field. Addressing their different complexity of the heat transfer, various theoretical and experimental analysis methods were applied.Laser beam welding is usually conducted with standard beam shapes, i.e. Gaussian or top-hat like, which is not always optimal for the process. Identification of an optimised weld pool shape or temperature cycle could increase the quality of welded products or even enable new applications. Papers A and B aim to increase the knowledge for non-standard beam shapes, particularly for single-pulse conduction mode welding. Paper A presents an investigation on an industrial application where a C-shaped weld joint is desired. The sensitivity to and optimization of different C-shaped beam irradiation profiles is discussed. The analysis is mainly carried out by applying Finite Element Analysis, FEA, to calculate the heat conduction contributions, showing unexpected sensitivity in certain regimes. Paper B presents a semi-analytical model for fast calculation of the temperature field from different beam profiles. Examples include multi-spots or the misalignment sensitivity of Diffractive Optical Elements.In Paper C, for laser hardening of 11% Cr ferritic stainless steel the temperature field was studied to enable hardening. It was shown that single-track hardening without sensitisation could be achieved but overlapping tracks had a continuous network of ditched grain boundaries and is thereby at risk for sensitisation. The sensitised area is caused by a reheating cycle.The same mechanism for the same material was studied in Paper D when applying a recently developed drop deposition technique, where additive manufacturing is fed by laser cutting. The same reheating isotherm becomes critical, but here sensitisation tests show a discontinuous network of ditched grain boundaries in the added material. The solid heat-affected zone on the other hand has a continuous network of ditched grain boundaries, which implies a sensitisation risk. The continuous network is however not in contact with the surface. The tested parameters is thus not at risk for intergranular corrosion through sensitisation.For friction stir welding of dissimilar metals, Ti-6Al-4V with AISI 304L stainless steel, Paper E, the influence of a laser-induced preheating temperature field on the tool forces was investigated through numerical simulation. By suitable application of laser preheating, the forces acting on the tool can be substantially lowered, in a robust manner.The temperature field from seam welding induces a residual stress field. In Paper F, for continuous wave laser keyhole welding of high strength steel butt joints, a method is presented to identify the residual stress behaviour of laser welded sheets by measurement of the fatigue crack growth rate during testing, by deriving the crack acceleration. The analysis was confirmed by hole drilling tests and by FEA.The knowledge and methods of the above different experimental and theoretical studies complement each other. They contribute to further optimize certain aspects through laser-induced temperature fields, for different manufacturing techniques.
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