• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.53-62
• /
• 1987

High power lasers provide a controllable and precise energy source in surface transformation hardening. A careful control of the process is needed in order that the surface layer of the material reaches the austenizing temperature, but that it does not melt. In order to achieve this the results of theoretical and experimental studies on the laser surface hardening of a medium carbon steel are described. A two-dimensional computer program, which can be used generally for the determination of transient temperature distributions in welding and heat treatment, was established on the basis of the finite element method. For the confirmation of the accuracy of the numerical analysis, a medium carbon steel (SM 45C) of 5mm thickness was heat-treated with a 1kW CW CO$_{2}$ laser machine, while the traverse speed and the distance from the focal point (defocused distance) were varied. Experimental and numerical results showed a similar tendency in correlations between the hardened zone shape and the process parameters. With increasing beam spot diameter the width and depth of the hardened zone increased for relatively small beam spot diameters, but decreased rapidly after reaching the maximum value, while with increasing traverse speed the width and depth of the hardened zone decreased monotonously. Too small beam spot diameters are to be avoided, since the surface melting would lower the surface hardness and produce an uneven surface which may be unacceptable because of the possible requirement for subsequent machining. It could be observed that for a given traverse speed and laser power input there exists a optimal range of the beam spot diameter, which produce a large width of the hardened zone but no melting on the surface.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.5 no.5
• /
• pp.985-993
• /
• 2001

Neural networks are shown to be effective in being able to distinguish incomplete penetration-like weld defects by directly analyzing the plasma which is generated on each impingement of the laser on the materials. The performance is similar to that of existing methods based on extracted feature parameters. In each case around 93% of the defects in a database derived from 100 artificially produced defects of known types can be placed into one of two classes: incomplete penetration and bubbling. The present method based on classification using plasma is faster, and the speed is sufficient to allow on-line classification during data collection.

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
• /
• v.54 no.5
• /
• pp.248-259
• /
• 2021

This study examined the influence of post weld heat treatment (PWHT) conditions on corrosion behaviors of laser-welded super duplex stainless steel tube. Due to the high cooling rate of laser welding, the phase fraction of ferrite and austenite in the weld metal became unbalanced significantly. In addition, the Cr₂N particles were precipitated adjacent to the fusion line, which can be susceptible to the localized corrosion. On the other hand, the phase fraction in the weld metal was restored at a ratio of 5:5 when exposed to temperatures above 1060 ℃ during the post weld heat treatment. Nevertheless, the high beltline speed during the PWHT, leading to the insufficient cooling rate, caused a precipitation of σ phase at the interface between ferrite/austenite in both weld metal and base metal. This resulted in the severe corrosion damages and significant decrease in critical pitting temperature (CPT), which was even lower than that measured in as-welded condition. Moreover, the fraction of σ phase in the center region of post weld heat treated steel tube was obtained to be higher than in the surface region. These results suggest that the PWHT conditions for the steel tube should be optimized to ensure the high corrosion resistance by excluding the precipitation of σ phase even in center region.