Laser beam brazing is a joining process particularly used in body-in-white applications. Typical areas of application are tailgates and roof to side panel connections where there should be paintable, watertight seams without any post treatment. With the CoaxBrazer processing head seams of high quality can be accomplished independent of the orientation. The coaxially fed filler wire and the integrated seam tracking enable any reorientation as long as the handling systems allow this movement. In combination with the ring shaped laser intensity distribution there is the effect of pre-heating the filler wire and the work piece which leads to significantly larger cross section and consequently a higher strength of the brazed joint. This is valid also for high process speeds of 10 m/min.
The innovative beam delivery principle furthermore allows large variations of the working angle which cannot be realized with state-of the-art tools. The innovative propagation of the laser beam and the coaxial wire support allow direction independent brazing and ensure high process stability. Due to the enlarged tolerance in working angle the programming of the robot path is considerably simpler. Speeding up of the process has no remarkable influence on the cross section.
