Abstract
Mild steel is a cheap and easily formed material, suitable for a wide range of engineering applications, but its corrosion and wear resistance are low. For this and other similar materials, surface coating is widely used to prolong component life by producing a hard, protective layer. In this work, a 2 kW Fibre laser is used to clad the Ni-based alloy Inconel 617 on mild steel substrates. The normally high material cost of doing this is alleviated by using waste chips from Inconel 617 machining rather than specially prepared gas atomised powder as the clad material. A Design of Experiments methodology is used to analyse the contribution and effects of the major laser cladding processing parameters on the deposited layer characteristics and hardness and microstructure variations with processing parameters are investigated. The results show a number of significant relationships between the processing parameters and the effectiveness of the protective coating. The layer thickness and hardness was found to be increased with the mass feed rate and decreased with an increase in laser power. Mainly columnar dendritic microstructure with regular array of cells has been observed in the clads without significant defects of bonding, unmelted particles and porosity.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | host publication |
| Place of Publication | Sweden |
| Publication status | Published - 2011 |
| Event | 25th International Conference on Surface Modification Technologies (SMT-25) - Trollhättan, Sweden Duration: 20 Jun 2011 → 22 Jun 2011 |
Conference
| Conference | 25th International Conference on Surface Modification Technologies (SMT-25) |
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| City | Trollhättan, Sweden |
| Period | 20/06/11 → 22/06/11 |