Application of laser welding in the automotive industry

The use of laser welding can bring huge economic benefits to the automobile manufacturing industry, such as a large number of spot welding in the body assembly, two welding heads are clamped on the edge of the workpiece for welding, the flange width needs to be 16mm, and laser welding is unilateral welding , Only 5mm is needed, and spot welding should be laser welding, and 40kg of steel can be saved per vehicle. Using traditional spot welding to weld two 0.8mm steel plate stamping parts, the average is 20 points/min, the welding distance is 25mm, that is, the speed is 0.5m/min, and the laser welding speed can reach more than 5m/min. The use of laser welding technology not only reduces costs, but also greatly improves production efficiency. At present, a set of kilowatt-level laser processing robot system only costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The safety and reliability of the new laser are also guaranteed. Its downtime rate is only 2%, and the protective measures are also extremely reliable. Laser welding requires a close match between the contact surfaces of the workpiece, which is not easy to achieve in the process. However, the current advanced clamping method and the flange design suitable for laser welding have solved this problem. The gradual maturity of laser welding technology makes The major automobile manufacturers have applied laser welding to the automobile production line without exception. The United States has long introduced high-power lasers into the automobile industry. There are more than 40 laser processing stations in the Detroit area, the center of the US automobile industry, which are used for cutting automobile metal parts and welding gears, reducing the number of automobile modifications from 5 years to 2 years. year. General Motors Corporation of the United States has adopted 22 laser processing production lines. Ford Motor Corporation of the United States has used Nd:YAG lasers combined with industrial robots to weld car bodies, which greatly reduced manufacturing costs. In 2000, the three major US automobile companies had 50% resistance points. The welding production line is replaced by a laser welding production line. In Japan, the successful application of laser welding on the production line has attracted the attention of the world. For example, the new method of stamping and forming thin steel plates after laser welding is used in the manufacture of automobile bodywork, which has now been imitated by most automobile manufacturers in the world. Many famous automobile companies in the world have built special laser welding production lines: Thyssen Steel's tailor-made car bottom welding production line, Volkswagen's gear laser processing production line, and 8 of the 18 workshops of the Mercedes-Benz car factory are equipped with lasers. Processing Equipment.