In the naval applications, as well as for infrastructure and construction sectors, welding of thick plates (>15 mm) has become of crucial importance. Nowadays, the common techniques involve several passes of traditional Gas-Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) to fill a gap with a precise geometry. These techniques are, inevitably, time consuming due to the necessity of multiple passes, material consuming because of the volume of the gap which needs to be filled and complicated due to the precise preparation of the joints. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose here a Hybrid Laser-Arc Welding (HLAW) technique in a configuration which allowed us to achieve a sound weld of two plates, 20 mm thick, of naval steel EH40 in a single pass. The goal has been obtained with a 16 kW fiber laser and a welding speed of 1500 mm/min. The most important result of this research is that the welds have been performed in a simple butt configuration, with straight edges of the plates and without any chamfer or additional preparation. Moreover, the length of the weld seam, 1 meter, guarantees the stability and the solidity of the process, its scalability over longer plates, and thus, an easy implementation on an industrial machine for massive production.
This result opens the way to a faster, more reliable, and less costly process for the welding of thick plates. Furthermore, since the constant increase of the achievable laser power, there is the reasonable hope to push the single-pass maximum weldable thickness even further.