Resistance Measurement of Laser Welded Dissimilar AlCu Joints

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 describes 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 significantly 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 measurements) and decreases the lead-time by reducing the time needed for the identification of suitable laser process parameters.