Beam shaping with a deformable mirror for gap bridging in autogenous laser butt welding

In autogenous laser butt welding the variability of the joint gap can cause problems in terms of weld seam quality. A suitable strategy to alleviate this is to dynamically shape the laser beam instead of a circular-shaped beam with typical Gaussian or top hat distributions. Currently available systems cannot reach sufficient performance due to both the real time control system for the shape variation and the limited laser power currently manageable. In the present work, the possibility of bridging the joint gap during welding using a deformable mirror to elongate the focused laser beam from circular to transversal elliptical shape was investigated. The effect of the beam shaping on the geometry of the weld pool and of the weld cross sections was analysed, for different values of the gap in comparison with a circular Gaussian beam. It was demonstrated that the adoption of a transversal elliptical laser beam makes the welding process more stable, especially for large gaps (i.e. larger than the circular beam radius). Thanks to the beam shaping, the extension of the fused zone (in terms of the cross section area, height and width) resulted to be less sensitive to the gap's dimension; in addition, the extension of the heat affected zone and the presence of undercuts were evidently reduced.