Tailored Blanks Welding with Weldone™:

The product known as "tailored blanks" (TB) for car body has been identified as main immediate target application for PLT.

One of the fastest growing technologies in metalworking today is the application of Tailor Welded Blanks (TWB) for manufacturing of automobiles and trucks. The learning curve period for the industry has been completed, and it is now expected to grow rapidly for several years.

The Weldone™-TB integrates in a single torch a laser beam and a high power plasma arc, to achieve unprecedented performance.

Benefits include:

- Increase in processing speed, by a minimum of 30% over laser alone.

- Reduced tolerance requirements, allowing variable gaps up to 0.35 mm.

- Reliable high quality welds that consistently achieve industry standards.

- Substantial reduction of scrap.

Ease of integration and operation is crucial to the market acceptance of a new technology. Accordingly, we have programmed the know-how of our expert process engineers into Weldone™ controller. The Weldone™ system is totally transparent to the operator, who needs only to choose the required program from a list in order to set up all parameters. The Weldone™ kits are truly “plug and play” systems, requiring as little as one working day for integration within an operating production line.

Weldone™ can have a significant impact on the economics of TWB production. By relaxing joint fit-up requirements edge preparation requirements can be relaxed as well, and scrap rates reduced. This can affect the equipment cost, duty cycle and part preparation costs. The throughput will rise both indirectly, for the above reasons, and directly, due to the increase in welding speed.

All this contributes to significant cost savings, in the order of up to 20% per part.

The Weldone™-TB product line includes kit units for integration with high power YAG and CO2 lasers. The Weldone™-TB kits allow existing welding systems to be upgraded quickly, as well as the fabrication of superior new systems.

To maximize ROI, different kit units are available for enhancement of systems with multiple welding stations sharing a single laser source and a single PSU.

Laser (3.5 kW YAG) vs. Weldone™- Hybrid system (1.5 kW on the surface YAG) on Al 5754 at 4.5 m/min shows superior quality and gap bridging capabilities of the Weldone™ unit with a lower laser investment cost for similar welding speeds.