Higher and Higher Thickness Welding

FASTER, RELIABLE, AND COST-EFFECTIVE WITH HYBRID LASER-ARC TECHNOLOGY

Welding of 20 mm thick EH40 steel by means of a single-pass hybrid laser-arc welding technique.

In the naval applications, as well as for infrastructure and construction sectors, welding of thick plates (>15 mm) has become of crucial importance. Nowadays, the common techniques involve several passes of traditional Gas-Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) to fill a gap with a precise geometry. These techniques are, inevitably, time consuming due to the necessity of multiple passes, material consuming because of the volume of the gap which needs to be filled and complicated due to the precise preparation of the joints.

To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a Hybrid Laser-Arc Welding (HLAW) technique in a configuration which allowed us to achieve a sound weld of two plates, 20 mm thick, of naval steel EH40 in a single pass. The most important result of this research is that the welds have been performed in a simple butt configuration, with straight edges of the plates and without any chamfer or additional preparation. Moreover, the length of the weld seam, 1 meter, guarantees the stability and the solidity of the process, its scalability over longer plates, and thus, an easy implementation on an industrial machine for massive production.

This result opens the way to a faster, more reliable, and less costly process for the welding of thick plates. Furthermore, since the constant increase of the achievable laser power, there is the reasonable hope to push the single-pass maximum weldable thickness even further.

“There is the reasonable hope to push the single-pass maximum weldable thickness even further” - Simone Peli | Physicist, R&D Department

PARTNERING WITH SMS

Specialist Machinery Sales (SMS) is a complete system and solution provider. SMS proudly offers the complete material handling to meet our client's material flow pain points and challenges; thus, innovating the traditional material flow of a fabricator's workshop- fabrication/assembly and welding out prior to shot blasting and painting. We are proud to be the only partner in Australia and New Zealand who can provide a complete system and integrate these machines from steel processing for all steel profiles and plate. We partner with only the best and superior machine tool builders that have been market leaders of innovation and automation to the steel industry. We strongly believe that the future for our clients and the steel industry is to link the various machines and technologies, software, material handling, and automation together. This is now possible with a mix of new and pre-loved machines that can be integrated into the material handling ecosystem and footprint available when partnering with SMS.