Timon Ahlers, Ronald Pordzik, Thorsten Mattulat

• Laser welding of hidden T-joints, connecting the web-sheet through the face-sheet of the joint can provide advantages like increased lightweight potential in manufacturing sandwich structures with thin-walled cores. However, maintaining the correct positioning of the beam relative to the joint is challenging. A method to reduce the effort of positioning is using optical coherence tomography (OCT), that interferometrically measures the reflection distance inside of the keyhole during laser deep penetration welding. In this study new approaches for targeted data processing of the OCT-signal to automatically detect misalignments are presented. It is shown that considering multiple components from the inference pattern and the respective signal intensities improve the detection accuracy of misalignments.