Abstract
In laser surface hardening processes, the geometrical parameters such as the depth and the width of a hardened layer can be utilized to assess the hardened layer quality. However, accurate monitoring of the geometrical parameters for on-line process control as well as for on-line quality evaluation is very difficult because the hardened layer is formed beneath a material surface and is not visible. Therefore, temperature monitoring of a point of specimen surface has most frequently been used as a process monitoring method. But, a hardened layer depends on the temperature distribution and the thermal history of a specimen during laser surface hardening processing. So, this paper describes the estimation results of the geometric parameters using multi-point surface temperature monitoring. A series of hardening experiments were performed to find the relationships between the geometric parameters and the measured temperature. Estimation results using a neural network show the enhanced effectiveness of multi-point surface temperature monitoring compared to one-point monitoring.
