Signal overlap in the monitoring of laser welding

Laser weld monitoring is usually based on the feedback from three photodiodes which are intended to provide independent information about the thermal condition of the melt (the T signal), the radiation from the plume of a heated gas above the melt (the P signal) and the amount of reflected laser light (the R signal). This work demonstrates that, in fact, the plume of the hot gas above the weld pool contributes a large part of the thermal signal, which has hitherto been assumed to come only from the melt itself. It is suggested that the correlation between the T and P signals is so strong that a T–P signal would be more useful than the raw T signal in identifying the fluctuations in infrared radiation from the melt pool.