Effect on Surface Properties of H13 Mold Steel Cladding Layer by Scanning Strategy

Abstract

Laser cladding technology is used to clad the surface layer of H13 mold steel with Ni60A metal powder coating to solve the failure problem. The study used JMatPro software to extract and fit the thermophysical property parameters of the substrate and the clad material, and then used ANSYS APDL software to qualitatively analyze the distribution of melt pool morphology, nodal temperature versus time course curve and residual stress magnitude during the laser cladding process. Based on the results of the minimum residual stress in the cladding, reasonable scan paths were derived for the preparation of metal coatings on the surface layer of the die steel. The results show that the maximum peak temperature of the cladding process is 2515°C using short path scanning. The cladding layer can form a good metallurgical bond with the substrate at this temperature, with a stress of 406.68 MPa in the scanning direction and 284.45 MPa perpendicular to the scanning direction, which is significantly smaller than the residual stresses of other scanning methods. The residual stress values for the different strategies are from largest to smallest: spiral scan, block scan, long path scan, and short path scan. The results of this study provide theoretical guidance for the selection of paths during cladding processing to reduce the waste of resources and also provide new ideas for exploring the feasibility of metallurgical bonding of materials to substrates.