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Laser welding offers the advantage of very low heat input to the weld, resulting in low distortion and the ability to weld heat sensitive components. To obtain good weld bead geometry the selection of input parameters is very important. Laser beam welding trials are carried-out for 1.6 mm thick austenitic stainless steel for different beam power, welding speed and beam angle. The experimental trials for butt-joint configuration are conducted based on three level Box-Behnken design with replication resulting in 15 trials. The transient temperature profiles and weld pool dimensions, depth of penetration (DP) and bead width (BW) of the weld have been calculated using finite element code SYSWELD. A three dimensional Conical Gaussian heat source and the temperature dependent thermo-physical properties of AISI 304 stainless steel sheet are employed for performing a non-linear transient thermal analysis. It is found …