Research on the Thermal Behavior of Surface Texture on Laser Cladding Layer of Mold Steel

Abstract

To extend the service life of mold steel and reduce the residual stresses generated during laser cladding to reduce defects such as surface cracks, this paper conducts a simulation study in terms of optimizing the laser cladding process parameters and pre-setting the surface texture. Firstly, using residual stress as an indicator, a three-factor, three-level orthogonal experiment was conducted using ANSYS on three factors: laser power, scanning speed, and spot radius, and then the experimental results were subjected to signal-to-noise ratio and extreme difference analysis to obtain the optimum process parameters: laser power of 800 W, spot radius of 1 mm and scanning speed of 20 mm/s. Subsequently, the mould steel was pre-textured under the optimum process parameters and the temperature and stress fields of the clad layers were compared with those without pre-texturing. The results show that the average residual stress in the pre-textured clad layer is 149 MPa, which is 58.56% lower than the average residual stress in the unpre-textured clad layer, which is consistent with the experimental results and verifies the feasibility of pre-texturing in the elimination of residual stress.