Abstract
The objective of this investigation is optimization for manufacturing laser welding process of crystalline polymer with experimental and numerical studies. Experimental results showed that the precise control of laser power was important for obtaining high quality welding products. It was found by Monte Carlo simulation that the difficulty of the numerical estimation of laser input power was caused by the precise estimation of laser efficiency because of energy loss due to permeation and refraction. The numerical result on convective phenomena in a molten pool indicated that the convective heat transfer was important only near the free surface, and the molten zone was very thin. In order to overcome these difficulties in the welding process, we proposed a newly defined absorption energy parameter. By rearranging the experimental results using this parameter, the laser efficiency on crystal polymer welding can easily be estimated.
