Investigation on a Novel Laser Impact Spot Welding

In this paper a novel laser impact spot welding (LISW) method is described, in which a hump was formed on the flyer plate on the intended welding spot location by local pre-forming. When the flyer and base plates were placed together to perform welding, the two plates kept in contact over their entire surfaces except at the hump, where a local air gap was enough to guarantee the impact velocity and collision angle to achieve spot welding using laser pulse energy. The presented approach was implemented to join thin titanium foils to copper foils under low laser energy system. Joints with regular shapes were obtained. The microstructure in the weld interface was studied with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). It was found that the jetting occurred at the central region of the weld spots due to oblique impact. Wave features were observed in the weld interfaces. The impact energy was found to have significant influence on the wave’s characteristics. Moreover, SEM images and EDS analysis did not show apparent element diffusion across the weld interface. Besides, the lap shearing test was used to characterize the mechanical properties of the spot welded joints.