Quality assessment in laser welding: a critical review

Quality assessment methods and techniques for laser welding have been developed both in- and post-process. This paper summarizes and presents relevant studies being classified according to the technology implemented (vision, camera, acoustic emissions, ultrasonic testing (UT), eddy current technique (ECT)) for the quality inspection. Furthermore, the current review aims to map the existing modeling approaches used to correlating measured weld characteristics and defects with the process parameters. Research gaps and implications of the quality assessment in laser welding are also described, and a future outlook of the research in the particular field is provided.