Compared to conventional welding process, laser welding does not use additional filler wire generally. However, if laser welding uses the filler wire, the applicability of the method can be broaden. When laser welding uses the filler wire, it is possible to enhance gap bridging ability and to prevent cracking in weld pool by metallurgical control. In this study, we had optimal condition and experimented gap bridging capability for butt welding with 2㎜ Al5052 alloys using the filler wire feeder. As the experimental parameters, wire feed rate and wire diameter are considered and then the performance of wire feed is evaluated under various filler wire welding conditions.

The uniform metal droplet generation using Nd-YAG laser was studied and experiment was carried out. The shape and volume of developed droplet was measured and the Young-Laplace equation and equilibrium condition of force were applied this model. The differential equation predicting shape of droplet using equilibrium condition of force instead of Navier-stokes equation was induced and numerical solution of differential equation compared with experimentation data. The differential equation was solved by Runge-Kutta method. Surface tension coefficient of droplet was determined with numerical solution relate to experimental result under the statical condition. In case of dynamic vibration, metal droplet shape and detaching critical volume are predicted by recalculating proposed model. The result revealed that this model could reasonably describe the behavior of molten metal droplet on vibration.

In order to investigate the characteristics of the plasma induced by lap-joint CO$_2$ laser welding of automotive steel sheets, the effects of welding speed, shield gas flow rate, gap size, and laser beam defocus to plasma intensity emitted from keyhole have been investigated. The plasma light is measured by fiber and photodiode. Also, the plasma images were captured by the high speed digital camera in 1000frames/sec in order to correlate the plasma light signal with plasma pattern. From the results, it is observed that the difference of the plasma intensity for between the deep penetration and partial penetration exists from 1.2 to 2 times. The plasma light intensity decreased in case of the deep penetration Is observed due to the exhausting of the plasma gas under the sheet. On the other hand, under the conditions of the deep penetration, the plasma intensity is significantly increased by controling the conditions decreasing the penetration depth. It was specially founded that the effect of 0.3mm gap size at partial penetration condition is approximately similar to deep penetration in 0mm gap. It is concluded that the plasma intensity is able to evaluate the penetration depth in lap-joint welding and appears to offer the most straightforward correlation to the welding process.