New System Concepts for Steel and Aluminum Tailored Blank Welding

The demand for the use of tailor welded blanks in the automotive industry continues to grow. The competition in this business is also growing. In order to be competitive, a cost effective and reliable welding system is critical. This paper introduces several system concepts for laser tailored blank welding including a production line with a reliable edge preparation unit in line. All systems can be used both for laser welding steel and aluminum parts. A comparison between high speed milling and laser cutting for edge preparation is also made. The results show that laser cutting is more suitable at the current stage for in-line edge preparation. The cycle time for a typical body side (3000 mm weld seam length) and door inner (2600 mm long weld seam) using this production line is 32 seconds and 14 seconds, respectively.