Adaptive control of the filler wire rate during laser beam welding of squared butt joints with varying gap width

Adding filler wire control to autogenous laser beam welding of squared butt joints offers a means to widen up the tight fit-up tolerances associated with this process. When the gap width varies, the filler wire rate should be controlled to assure a constant geometry of the resulting weld seam. A dual mode sensing system is proposed to estimate the joint gap width and thereby control the filler wire rate. A vision camera integrated into the welding tool together with external LED illumination and a laser line projection enables two sensing modes, one surface feature extraction mode and one laser triangulation-based mode. Data from the both modes are fused in a Kalman filter, and comparisons show that the fusing of the data gives more robust estimation than estimates from each single mode. A feed-forward control system adaptively adjusts the filler wire rate based on the estimations of the joint gap width in front of the keyhole. The focus is on keeping the data processing simple and affordable, and the real-time performance of the sensor and control system has been evaluated by welding experiments. It is shown that the proposed system can be used for on-line control of the filler wire rate to achieve a constant weld geometry during varying joint gap widths.