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Aluminum tailor welded blanks in the automotive industry continues to grow due to the light weight of aluminum itself and the characteristics of the tailor welded blanks. It has been found that welding of aluminum blanks with co2 laser is difficult but doable in a production environment and using high power CW Nd:YAG laser can obtain sound results with a much wider process parameter window. However, currently, high power CO2 lasers (in the range of 8 kW) are still the dominate laser sources in steel tailor welded blank companies in north America. Will these lasers be able to weld aluminum tailored blanks if the demand of aluminum tailor welded blanks increases? This study employed twin spot and beam shaping methods to weld 1mm combined with 2 mm tailored blanks using high power (9 kW maximum) CO2 laser for both 5754-O and 6111-T4 alloys. The results show that high power CO2 lasers can be used for welding 5754-O and 6111-T4 aluminum alloys with very precise parameter settings.

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.