Resistance measurement of dissimilar Al/Cu laser welds

Aluminum and Copper were joined using the laser-based braze-welding process. By avoiding the intermixture of both conductive materials, the formation of brittle intermetallic compounds is strongly reduced. This results in a tough, ductile connection with reduced electric resistance. This paper de-scribes a method, which is based on the 4-wire method, to measure the resistance of the weld seam. The arrangement of the conductive electrodes directly on top and bottom of the weld seam signifi-cantly increases the accuracy of the measured resistances, thus offers a direct estimation of the inter-metallic layer thickness. The electric measuring of the layer thickness is a non-destructive method, which assists in the reduction of the post-process effort (cross sections, pull tests, hardness measure-ments) and decreases the lead-time by reducing the time needed for the identification of suitable laser process parameters.