Laser welding with filler wire

New applications such as welding of material combinations and the ability to fill opening gaps between the workpieces offer new prospects for laser beam welding processes with filler wire. To guarantee good quality, vertical distance variations between wire tip and weld pool are, above all, not permissible as this causes globular metal transfer and would accordingly result in strongly rippled, unclean welds. A process-internal signal, recorded by a sensor, helps to solve this problem. The automatic tracking of the vertical wire position is possible on-line via a controller. In this way, the running process can be optimized and a consistently good weld quality can be achieved.