Abstract
Because of the turbulent markets and the increasing demand on product quality, the application of new technology to practice is increasingly important. In case of automotive industries, they take interest in laser welding to solve these problems because laser welding has many advantages such as good accessibility, welding quality, fast welding speed and so on. To apply this technology to welding of car body, the data of laser welding are collected through lots of the experiment according to the material, geometry and layer number of welding points. Based on the experiment results and the information of product, i.e. the car side panel, the clustering of stitches for laser welding was carried out and the optimal equipments are selected through the comparison between the requirements of welding and the potential of equipments. Using these results, laser welding cell for the car side panel are configured with the concept of the digital manufacturing, which ensures maximum planning security with visualization and simulation. Finally, the optimal laser welding cell is chosen by the evaluation of alternative cells with assessment criteria.
