Product design for welding

Abstract

The utilization of laser is growing for various applications. These applications have been mostly among those of car manufacturing and car components. Only lately, partly due to lower sales among car manufacture, the applications among machine building has been getting growing interest and quite a few applications has been coming public. The laser cutting and welding can usually provide low production costs and trough put time if efficiently utilized. One real obstacle to overcome prior further utilization is the adapting the real potential of laser into the structure of the product. The advantages of laser welding in product design are only seldom realized. Still this would be an important factor to be taken into account and would justify the laser investment in several cases. This paper deals with development of procedures for product design for welding. Systematic procedure gives potential to modulation and cost effectiveness gained with that. The procedure starts from common rules of design for automated and robotized welding since the basic criteria of those should also be fulfilled for welding. Some typical examples are shown and a collection of ways to utilize laser in product design.