Process Signature for Laser Hardening

Abstract

During many manufacturing processes for surface treatment of steel components heat will be exchanged between the environment and the workpiece. The heat exchange commonly leads to temperature gradients within the surface near area of the workpiece, which involve mechanical strains inside the material. If the corresponding stresses exceed locally the yield strength of the material residual stresses can remain after the process. If the temperature increase is high enough additionally phase transformation to austenite occurs and may lead further on due to a fast cooling to the very hard phase martensite. This investigation focuses on the correlation between concrete thermal loads such as temperature and temperature gradients and resulting modifications such as changes of the residual stress, the microstructure, and the hardness respectively. Within this consideration the thermal loads are the causes of the modifications and will be called internal material loads. The correlations between the generated internal material loads and the material modifications will be called Process Signature. The idea is that Process Signatures provide the possibility to engineer the workpiece surface layer and its functional properties in a knowledge-based way. This contribution presents some Process Signature components for a thermally dominated process with phase transformation: laser hardening. The target quantities of the modifications are the change of the residual stress state at the surface and the position of the 1st zero-crossing of the residual stress curve. Based on Finite Element simulations the internal thermal loadings during laser hardening are considered. The investigations identify for the considered target quantities the maximal temperature, the maximal temperature gradient, and the heating time as important parameters of the thermal loads.