Zinc-coated steel sheets are widely used in all
fields, such as the corrosion-resistant panels in construction
industry and the shells of household appliances in
light industry, due to their fine corrosion-resistance. In
recent years, to improve the automobile's corrosion resistance
and life under bad conditions, there is an increasing
application of zinc coated sheets, for example, in making
parts of automobile-bodies and bases It! .
The major automotive manufacturers have embraced
the technology of laser welding tailored blanks 121 . A tailored
blank can be defined as a blank which is composed
of two or more different sheets with the same or dissimilar
thickness and/or physical properties, joined together before
forming to provide customized and superior qualities
in final products. Statistics shows that there are more than
100 production lines of laser welding tailored blanks all
over the world. As laser welding is an autogenous method
with high precision, the process of edge preparation is one
of the key factors for achieving sound welds. High precision
shearing machines are often used to prepare the edges
to meet the demands for linearity and flatness of blank
edges before welding i3-61 Another method of laser cutting,
can also meet the demands for laser welding, despite
the fact that laser cutting is not as good as high-precision
shearing in aspects such as stability and efficiency
Ivl . This paper aims to studying the technical feasibility
and properties of the joints of laser wehting for two
kinds of zinc-coated steel blanks tailored by laser cutting
on a system designed by ourselves.