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New innovative deposition technologies are requested by many companies to improve the properties and effectiveness of wear resistant layers to achieve higher life-times of highly stressed components. Therefore this paper presents investigations and results from Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT concerning the enhanced melting deposition rate and the improved flexibility of the scanner-based laser cladding process, by keeping the benefits of the usual laser cladding process

This paper presents an analysis of a scanner-based laser cladding process and its integration into a hybrid machining center. After deducing a robust set of process parameters from experiments for scanner-based cladding which reliably yield defined geometries, we present an automation architecture to encapsulate the hardware that is specific to this process. We then describe a planning approach in CAM software to facilitate using the scanner-based cladding process within a planning framework for milling processes. After introducing a hybrid laser tool which enables new stabilizing process possibilities we conclude with an approach to combine all these findings into a seamless machine concept of which we present a prototype

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The automotive sector is one of the largest energy consumers in Germany. Requests from politics and industry to significantly reduce emissions require new developments during utilization as well as during production phase. In line with the framework concept "InnoCaT", where more than 60 companies and research facilities from Germany take part, possibilities for producing companies are developed and analyzed to reduce the resource and energy consumption and by this reducing costs along the entire process chain of car body manufacturing. One approach to design car bodies lighter and more efficiently is to use aluminium and high strength steels. By this means weight and sheet thickness are reduced. However higher strengths of the steels and the adhesion affinity of aluminium significantly increase the requirements regarding the used tool steel. Thus grooves or galling appear more frequent at highly stressed surfaces. To assure high lifetimes and by this increase especially the resource efficiency concerning use of material and setting-up times within the press plant, a local optimization at the highly stressed surfaces is necessary. For this a FEM/BEM-tool for a time efficient and exact calculation of the occurring tool loads for complex die profiles is developed. Based on this development of load calculation a shape-optimization is performed at the corresponding areas. After the geometric optimization of the tool a local laser surface treatment for further wear protection is carried out using laser cladding or laser alloying/ -dispersing. By combining the technologies a highly wear resistant surface is achievable, which increases the tool's lifetime as well as the reproducibility within production.