Laser - material interactions such as welding, heat treatment and thermal bending generate thermal gradients which give rise to thermal stresses and strains which often result in a permanent distortion of the heated object. This paper investigates the thermal distortion response which results from pulsed laser surface melting of a stainless steel sheet. Pulsed holography has been used to accurately monitor, in real time, the out-of-plane distortion of stainless steel samples melted on one face by with both single and multiple laser pulses. It has been shown that surface melting by additional laser pulses increases the out of plane distortion of the sample without significantly increasing the melt depth. The distortion differences between the primary pulse and subsequent pulses has also been analysed for fully and partially overlapping laser pulses.

A new laser welding process is presented which delivers a porosity free, spatter free weld. The process involves a donut shaped melt with a central hole of the same order of magnitude as the material thickness. The laser illuminates only the leading section of this melt. The hole is kept open by the melt surface tension.

Welding distortion is an important engineering topic for simulation and modeling, and there is a need for experimental verification of such models by experimental studies. High-speed pulsed digital holography is proposed as a measurement technique for out-of-plane welding distortion. To demonstrate the capability of this technique, measurements from a laser spot weld are presented. A complete twodimensional deformation map with submicrometer accuracy was acquired at a rate of 1000 measurements per second. From this map, particular points of interest can be extracted for analysis of the temporal development of the final distortion geometry.