Laser beam welding of dissimilar ferritic/martensitic stainless steels in a butt joint configuration

This paper investigates laser beam welding of dissimilar AISI430F and AISI440C stainless steels. A combined welding and pre-and-postweld treatment technique was developed and used successfully to avoid micro-crack formation. This paper also examined the effects of laser welding parameters and line energy on weld bead geometry and tried to obtain an optimized laser-welded joint using a full factorial design of experiment technique. The models developed were used to find optimal parameters for the desired geometric criteria. All the bead characteristics varied positively as laser power increased or welding speed decreased. Penetration size factor decreased rapidly due to keyhole formation for line energy input in the range of 15–20 kJ/m. Laser power of 790–810 W and welding speed of 3.6–4.0 m/min were the optimal parameters providing an excellent welded component. Whatever the optimization criteria, beam incident angle was around its limiting value of 15° to achieve optimal geometrical features of the weld.

► Ferritic/martensitic stainless steels were laser butt welded.
► Combined pre-and-postweld treatment technique was developed and used.
► Parametric and line energy effects on weld geometrical properties were examined.
► Multi-response optimization technique was used to optimize the process parameters.
► New technique was able to mitigate micro-crack formation problem.