A Study on Laser Joining of Low Carbon Steel and Aluminum Alloy - Part 1 : Process Parameters

Park, Tae-Wan; Cho, Jung-Ho; Na, Suck-Joo

Journal of KWJS 2005;23(5):26-30.
Published online November 11, 2005.

[연구논문] 강과 알루미늄의 레이저 접합에 관한 연구 - Part 1 : 접합 변수의 최적 조건에 관한 연구

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A Study on Laser Joining of Low Carbon Steel and Aluminum Alloy - Part 1 : Process Parameters

Tae-Wan Park, Jung-Ho Cho, Suck-Joo Na

Abstract

Steel has been mainly used in the automotive industry, because of good mechanical properties, weldability and so on. However, there has been increase in using aluminum to reduce the weight of vehicle. This leads to improve fuel efficiency and to reduce air pollution. A steel-aluminum hybrid body structure is recently used not only to reduce the weight of vehicle but also to increase safety. In this paper, the laser beam joining method is suggested to join steel and aluminum. To avoid making brittle intermetallic compounds(IMC) that reduce mechanical properties of the joint area, only aluminum is melted by laser irradiation and wetted on the steel surface. The brittle IMC layer is formed with small thickness at the interface between steel and aluminum. By controlling the process parameters, brittle IMC layer thickness is suppressed under 10 micrometers which is a criterion to maintain good mechanical properties.