Analysis of laser weld quality sensor signals by stepwise LDA

Research was conducted to investigate the use of optical, air-born acoustic and plasma charge signals for detecting defects in laser welds. Full penetration, partial penetration and gapped-full penetration butt-joint welds were made in 1.4mm cold-rolled steel sheet. A 3 kW CO2 laser was used to produce these three classes of welds while laser power, travel speed and joint fitup were varied to produce the various conditions. Visible light, audible sound and electrical charge near the plume were measured simultaneously in real-time using a silicon photodiode, a condensor microphone and a plasma charge sensing gas nozzle, respectively. The spectra of the sensor signals were analyzed by a statistical technique known as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Stepwise LDA was used to identify the most important frequency bands and canonical discriminant analysis was employed to develop discriminant functions. Reliability analysis of the training samples revealed that this LDA method classified laser welds with reliability ranging from 85% to 96%, depending on the welds selected for inclusion in the training set. When the linear discriminant function was validated using new (untrained) samples, it distinguished the three different classes of laser welds with approximately 87% accuracy. Among the three signals, sound produced better separation between the classes of welds, although a discriminator based on all three signals combined and one that used only plasma charge and acoustic signals were of almost equal reliability.