ACCEL – Adapted Chemical Composition of materials for Enhanced Laser welding

The project aims at developing and understand advanced chemical steel compositions and get insights of their behavior during laser welding and laser cutting operations, to achieve higher energy efficiency of the processes along with higher robustness and to eliminate certain operations in the production chain.

Six partners with complementary steel expertise will study three techniques. Laser-arc hybrid welding provides cooling cycles that are more suitable for advanced high-strength steels compared to other techniques, provided the filler wire chemistry is matched. For its joint edge preparation, laser cutting is a candidate to further decrease energy and costs. However, when cutting certain advanced steels, uncontrolled melt oxidation can demand lower speed, which requires better understanding. For bi-metal laser welding of sawblades imperfections can arise that require significant post-treatment by current practices, and therefore needs to be avoided.

The proposed development will be accelerated by establishing a new, efficient testbed for faster tailoring and understanding of the steel chemistry in the respective thermal process. The recently accomplished experimental Snapshot testbed will be developed further, closely imitating the chosen processes. In particular, it will be extended by a computational framework to predict the generated metallurgy, assisting physical experiments to adapt steel chemistry and microstructures for a particular application.

Project leader
Jan Frostevarg
[email protected]
+46 (0) 705204750

Participating organisations
→ LTU
→ LU
→ SSAB
→ ESAB
→ ERASTEEL
→ SNA Europe