In industry, a technological leader is Kawasaki Heavy Industries Kanto Technical Institute in Chiba Prefecture. Located next door to a large Kawasaki steel fabrication plant, this institute is working on the basic technologies needed to realize laser welding for thick steel plate. This is achieved through a highly concentrated application of energy to the weld joint. The heat penetrates vertically into the weld joint with little lateral dispersion across the plates. In principle, laser welding could be just as fast as ordinary arc welding for a given plate thickness.
Fillet welds pose additional problems in laser systems development.
Another challenge is that laser weld joints must have a gap of zero to 0.3mm and must be completed in one pass only. Laser cut parts are accurate enough that their joint surfaces should require no machining or other secondary processing to be suitable for laser welding. Laser welding should first appear in shipbuilding at the small sub-assembly stage. For downstream sub-assemblies and block assembly, accumulated error will be a problem until the accuracy of the total production system is brought to the next level. ZoHaku Web Advanced data exchange between shipyards and suppliers A group of Japanese shipbuilding companies, marine equipment manufacturers, trading companies, and IT firms has announced plans to set up a new corporation in March 2001 for the purpose of implementing the ZoHaku Web, a new infrastructure for the exchange of engineering data between shipyards and their suppliers.