• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.176-183
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• 2005

Laser heat treatment technology is used for improving the feature of fatigue resistance and wear resistance in mobile parts. The purpose of this study is to compare the characteristics of laser heat treatment and high frequency heat treatment, which is commonly used in industrial place. For the preemptive experiment, the distribution, depth and size of hardening and its micro-structural features were compared between surface heat treatment case by defocusing and variables of each process for heat treatment by exclusively manufactured heat treatment optical system. As a result, high frequency heat treatment has wide distribution of hardening depth and width about 3 times larger than laser heat treatment, however, its average hardness showed 621.4Hv which is smaller than the average hardness of laser heat treatment with 691Hv.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Heat Treatment
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.339-344
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• 2009

Recently, Laser surface treatment technologies have been used to improve wear charactenitics and fatigue resistance of metal molding. When the laser beam is irradiated on the surface and laser speed is appropriate, the laser focal position is rapidly heated and the thermal energy of surface penetrates the material after irradiation, finally imbuing it with a new mechanical characteristic by the process of self-quenching. This research estimates the material characteristic after efficient and functional surface treatment using HPDL, which is more efficient than the existing CW Nd:YAG laser heat source. To estimate this, microstructural changes and hardness characteristics of three parts (the surface treatment part, heat affect zone, and parental material) are observed with the change of laser beam speed and surface temperature. Moreover, the depth of the hardened area is observed with the change of the laser beam speed and temperature. From the results of the experiments, it has been shown that the maximum hardness is approximately 788Hv when the heat treatment temperature and the travel speed are $1150^{\circ}$ and 2 mm/sec, respectively.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Heat Treatment
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.257-262
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• 2010

Recently, metal molding has become essential not only for automobile parts, but also mass production, and has greatly influenced production costs as well as the quality of products. Its surface has been treated by carburizing, nitriding and induction hardening, but these existing treatments cause considerable deformation and increase the expense of postprocessing after treatment; furthermore, these treatments cannot be easily applied to parts that requiring the hardening of only a certain section. This is because the treatment cannot heat the material homogeneously, nor can it heat all of it. Laser surface treatment was developed to overcome these disadvantages, and, when the laser beam is irradiated on the surface and laser speed is appropriate, the laser focal position is rapidly heated and the thermal energy of surface penetrates the material after irradiation, finally imbuing it with a new mechanical characteristic by the process of self-quenching. This research estimates the material characteristic after efficient and functional surface treatment using HPDL, which is more efficient than the existing CW Nd:YAG laser heat source.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.23 no.7 s.184
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• pp.39-50
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• 2006

Laser heat treatment technologies have been used to improve characteristics of wear and to enhance the fatigue resistance for automotive parts. The bjective of this research work is to investigate the influence of the process parameters, such as power of laser and defocused spot position, on the characteristics of laser heat treatment for the case of SM45C medium carbon steel. CW Nd:YAG laser is selected as the heat source. The optical lens with the elliptical profile is designed to obtain a wide heat treatment area with a uniform hardness. From the results of the experiments, it has been shown that the maximum hardness is approximatly 780 Hv when the power and the travel of laser are 1,095 W and 0.6 m/min, respectively. In addition, the hardening width using the elliptical lens was three time larger than that using the defocusing of laser beam.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.35 no.8
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• pp.1048-1054
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• 2011

Laser surface hardening process is the method of hardening surface by inducing rapid self quenching of laser injected area through transfer of surface heat to inside after rapid heating of laser injected area only by high density energy heat source. This surface treatment method does not involve virtually any thermal deformation by heat treatment nor accompanies any other process after surface hardening treatment. In addition, allowing local machining, this method is a surface treatment method suitable for die with complicated shape. In this study, die material cast iron was surface-treated by using high power diode laser with beam profile suitable for heat treatment. Since the shapes of die differ by press die process, specimens were heat-treated separately on plane and corner depending on the applied parts. At this time, corner heat treatment was done with optic head inclined at $10^{\circ}$. As a result, corner heat treatment easily involves concentration of heat input due to limitation of heat transfer route by the shapes compared with plane part, so the treatment accomplished hardening at faster conveying speed than plane heat treatment.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.8-14
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• 2015

Heat treatment for car body molds is mainly a manual process performed by a worker. The performance of this process is affected by workers' skill level, and has limitation in maintaining uniform product quality. In this study, we developed a diode laser heat treatment robot system that implements an OLP type simulator to overcome the limitation of manual process, and to improve and stabilize the quality level. In addition, we verified the efficiency of the robot system and mechanism stability from the early stage through design verification and simulated analysis in the development stage. In addition, we carried out a field test to study the way to establish optimized D/B for diode laser heat treatment criteria for car body molds, such as heat treatment speed, interval, etc. via site experiment.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.364-370
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• 2011

Currently, there are two main issues regarding the development of core technologies in the automotive industry: the development of environmentally friendly vehicles and securing a high level of safety in the event of an accident. As part of the efforts to address these issues, research into alternative materials and new car body manufacturing and assembly technologies is necessary, and this has been carried out mainly by the automotive industries. Large press molds for producing car body parts are made of cast iron. With the increase of automobile production and various changes of design, the press forming process of car body parts has become more difficult. In the case of large press molds, high hardness and abrasive resistance are needed. To overcome these problems, we attempted to develop a combined heat treatment process consisting of local laser heat treatment followed by plasma nitriding, and evaluated the characteristics of the proposed heat treatment method. From the results of the experiments, it has been shown that the maximum surface hardness is 864 Hv by the laser heat treatment, 953 Hv by the plasma nitriding, and 1,094 Hv by the combined heat treatment. It is anticipated that the suggested combined heat treatment can be used to evaluate the durability of press mold.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.52-58
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• 2019

The microstructure, hardness, and wear behaviors of a High Velocity Oxygen Fuel(HVOF) sprayed WC-CoFe coating are comparatively investigated before and after laser heat treatments of the coating surface. During the spraying, the binder metal is melted and a small portion of WC is decomposed to $W_2C$. A porous coating is formed by evolution of carbon oxide gases formed by the reaction of the free carbon and the sprayed oxygen gas. The laser heat treatment eliminates the porosity and provides a more densified microstructure. After laser heat treatment, the porosity in the coating layer decreases from 1.7 % to 1.2 and the coating thickness decreases from $150{\mu}m$ to $100{\mu}m$. The surface hardness increases from 1440 Hv to 1117 Hv. In the wear test, the friction coefficient of coating decreases from 0.45 to 0.32 and the wear resistance is improved by the laser heat treatment. The improvement is likely due to the formation of oxide tribofilms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.16-23
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• 2007

An experimental investigation with diode laser system was carried out to study the effect of surface heat treatment on the die materials(SM45C, SKD11, SK3). The surface heat treatment characteristics of the laser beam are evaluated using hardness tests, optical microscopy, X-ray diffraction and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy(EDS). Results indicated that the beam size, focal length, feed rates are changed surface hardened characteristics. SM45C is higher hardness than other materials and composed to martensite grain at hardened zone, whereas other materials(SKD11, SK3)are low hardness than expected and composed to austenite and allayed martensite at hardened zone. The intensive X-ray diffraction patterns of (110)-(200)-(211) is detected hardened surface and the hardened surface distributed plenty of carbon density than metal zone.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.1898-1904
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• 2003

Laser heat treatment is an effective technique used to improve the tribological properties and also to increase the service life of automobile components such as camshafts, crankshatfs, lorry brake drums and gears. High power $CO_{2}$ lasers and Nd:YAG lasers are employed for localized hardening of materials and hence are of potential application in the automobile industries. The heat is conducted rapidly into the bulk of the specimen causing self-quenching to occur and the formation of matrensitic structure. In this investigation, the microstructrual features occurring in Nd:YAG laser hardening SM45C and $STD_{11}$ steel are discussed with the use of optical microscopic and scanning electron microscopic analysis. Moreover, This paper describes the optimisation of the processing parameters for maximum hardened depth of SM45C and $STD_{11}$ steel specimens of 10mm thickness by using CW Nd:YAG laser.