In high power CO2 laser welding, the welding behaviour is significantly affected

by a presence of the laser-induced plasma. The plasma absorbs or scatters the laser beam
and leads to a reduction in the penetration depth. In a keyhole, the intermittent
evaporation [1,2 ] of the base metal should the cause the rapid change in the plasma
composition and temperature. This means that the direct heat input by the laser beam
fluctuates rapidly due to the fluctuation of the absorption coefficient in the plasma. Thus,
it is very important to know the role of the plasma in CO2 laser welding. Some interesting
research works have been done to analyse the characteristic of the plasma and discuss the
laser-plasma interaction using a spectroscopic method [3,8]
Effect of Welding Parameters on Plasma Formation and Penetration Depth
Figure 3 shows the penetration depth for various flow rates of shielding gas. A clear
reduction in the penetration depth can be seen with decreasing the flow rate of Ar
shielding gas, whereas it shows almost a constant value in He shield. The reduction in the
penetration depth corresponds well with the size of the gas plasma in Ar shielded
welding. The plasma was expanded with decreasing the flow rate as show in Fig s4.
The beam focusing condition also affects the size of Ar plasma. It increase as the focal
point shifts upward from inside the substrate surface (with increasing fd, fd : distance
from focal point) as shown in Fig 5. The penetration depth again corresponds to the
plasma size. The difference of the penetration depth between Ar He shields is more
significant with increasing fd as shown in Fig 6. Thus the gas plasma exerts a great
influence on the penetration depth.
Critical Laser Power Density for Plasma Formation
Fig 7 shows the typical result where the laser power changed under the constant
focusing condition and flow rate of Ar shielding gas. The critical power density shows
approximately a constant value of about 6.6 X 105 W/cm2 , although the plasma size
increases significantly with the laser power. Similar tendency was found for various
focusing conditions. These results indicate that the formation region of the plasma is
determined by the power density above the work piece if the composition and the flow
rate of the shielding gas are constant.
This fact well explains the variation of the plasma size for various welding conditions.
The increase in the incident laser power increases the plasma size due to an expansion of
higher power density region. The beam focal point also affects the plasma-forming
region, where the power density exceeds the critical one, is expanded above the work
piece as shown in fig 8 . This is the reason why the plasma enlarges for upper focusing
conditions (larger fd ) . On the other hand, the critical power density increases with the
flow rate as shown in fig 9, because the number of atoms to be ionized increases for
higher flow rate.