Bending behaviour of surface corroded and perforated corroded steel tubes repaired by laser cladding additive manufacturing

Abstract

In recent years, laser cladding (LC) technology has been increasingly applied and investigated for repairing damaged surface on metal structural components. However, there are limited experimental studies on the bending behaviour of the LC repaired steel components. And an effective repair method for the perforated corroded steel components is still lacking, therefore, this paper introduces a novel LC repair method for such steel tube. Four-point bending tests were conducted on four specimens, including one intact steel tube (IT), one surface corroded steel tube (SCT), one surface corroded steel tube repaired by LC (SRT), and one perforated corroded steel tube repaired by LC (PRT) to verify the effectiveness of the LC repair methods by evaluating their structural performance in terms of bending capacity, rotational stiffness, and ductility. The experimental results showed that the bending strength and rotational stiffness of the SRT and PRT can be fully restored and even slightly higher than those of the IT. The strain analysis indicated that the LC repair method can significantly reduce stress/strain concentration caused by surface corrosion and perforation corrosion. The experiments were replicated numerically by means of finite element (FE) analysis and parametric studies were performed to investigate the effect of different factors on the bending behaviour of the PRT and SRT. Furthermore, design formula for predicting the elastic bending capacity of the LC repaired steel tube was developed.