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ISSN Online: 2377-424X

International Heat Transfer Conference 12
August, 18-23, 2002, Grenoble, France

Heat Transfer in Laser Transmission Welding of Thermoplastics Using Functional Pigment

Get access (open in a dialog) DOI: 10.1615/IHTC12.3550
6 pages

Sinopsis

This paper deals with heat transfer in welding of overlaping transparent thermoplastics using a near infrared laser. Most of thermoplastics are transparent to near-infrared laser; therefore it is difficult to weld a pair of overlapped transparent materials by a laser beam, since there is no absorption region within them. In order to overcome such difficulty, a functional pigment which has the appropriate characteristic to near-infrared radiation was applied in laser welding: a very thin film which is added a pigment absorbing the near-infrared radiation but transparent at invisible wavelength at the interface of the transparent plastic pieces to be weld has been proposed. The influence of the absorptivity of transparent film on heating the weldments has been studied experimentally. The temperature distribution within the plastics was calculated by numerical simulation in order to estimate the validity of the proposing experimental systems. It was estimated from this numerical simulation that enough heat could be generated instantaneously to weld the polymeric workpieces. It was confirmed that welding was performed keeping the transparency through the weldments in the experimental investigation using tens-micron-thick pigmented film.