Abstract
The use of lasers to weld polymer sheets provides a means of highly-adaptive and custom additive manufacturing for a wide array of industrial, medical, and end user/consumer applications. This paper provides an open source design for a laser polymer welding system, which can be fabricated with low-cost fused filament fabrication and off-the-shelf mechanical and electrical parts. The system is controlled with free and open source software and firmware. The operation of the machine is validated and the performance of the system is quantified for the mechanical properties (peak load) and weld width of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) lap welds manufactured with the system as a function of linear energy density. The results provide incident laser power and machine parameters that enable both dual (two layers) and multilayer (three layers while welding only two sheets) polymer welded systems. The application of these parameter sets provides users of the open source laser polymer welder with the fundamental requirements to produce mechanically stable LLDPE multi-layer welded products, such as heat exchangers.
Highlights
Focused laser radiation absorbed into a polymer interface produces an elevated temperature, which can be used for inter-layer bonding
This paper provides open source designs for a laser polymer welding system and explores the mechanical properties and weld width appearance of linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) lap welds manufactured with the system
An open-source computer numeric control (CNC) laser welder [16] was modified for this experiment
Summary
Focused laser radiation absorbed into a polymer interface produces an elevated temperature, which can be used for inter-layer bonding. A contact free manufacturing method, such as laser welding, provides increased flexibility and further application than its conventional joint bonding processes [1]. Characterization of polymer welds and in-process monitoring techniques have been explored with acoustic, optical, thermal, ultrasonic, and emission techniques [8,9]. The application of polymer sheet material(s) for lap-joint laser welding applications is not uncommon. Ghorbel et al characterized the thermal and mechanical behavior of some thermoplastic polymers [10]. They successfully welded polypropylene sheets by diode-laser transmission welding [11] and selected soundness variables for the diode laser welding of polypropylene thermoplastic polymers by experimental and numerical analysis [12]. The work described indicates that efficient welding of polymer materials is the result
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