EXPERIMENTS REGARDING THE INFLUENCE OF PRESSURE PROFILING ON LASER-TRANSMISSION WELDING

Laser transmission welding of thermoplastics is being increasingly used to join complex, assembly-oriented parts by virtue of the small heat-affected zone and the very wide and flexible range of application. High joining pressures on the one hand allow short cycle times, on the other hand, they lead to small remaining melt layers in the joining and thus to lower strengths of the weld. In this work, an experimental setup to realize a time-dependent joining pressure profiling is prototyped for quasi-simultaneous welding processes and experiments to show the influence of pressure profiling on weld strength are carried out with different materials. It is shown, that a pressure profiling can lead to higher weld strengths for some materials. Especially, pressure profiling for welding polypropylene semi finished parts can improve the welding quality.