Plasma metal deposition of stainless steel 316L over mild steel surface

Abstract

Plasma metal deposition (PMD) is an additive manufacturing process capable of layer by layer construction, repair, and reconstruction of metallic parts. One of the important characteristics of cladding with PMD is the ability to control the wire feed, plasma arc energy, thus allowing the melt pool to be controlled. In this paper stainless steel 316L was deposited in the form of wire on a block of mild steel. Experiments were focused to infer the influence of plasma power, travel speed and wire feed rate on the quality of track. Different parameters were varied to observe the various geometrical parameters and their relationship with the energy source and material feed rate was established. The results show that plasma power and wire feed rate have a significant impact on height and width of the deposited track. Aspect ratios ranging from 0.85 to 4.6 were obtained. Higher values of aspect ratio at lower wire feed rates and at optimum plasma power was further used for deposition of defect free surface. An overlapping distance of 1.73 mm was used for surface cladding. This method can also be used for remanufacturing of surface of moulds and die.