The plasma optical radiation emitted during CO2 laser welding of stainless steel samples has been detected with a Si-PIN photodiode and analyzed under different process conditions. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been used to decompose the optical signal into various discrete series of sequences over different frequency bands. The results show that changes of the process settings may yield different signal features in the range of frequencies between 200 Hz and 30 kHz. Potential applications of this method to monitor in real time the laser welding processes are also discussed.
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