The laser market expands

1991/03/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Teknologia

The harmful effect of wear and corrosion on industrial components can be solved by laser. The research and development department of the Swiss company Sulzer has launched several applications for the laser. These include surface treatment, prototyping, coatings and alloys.

Laser coating is a thermal procedure applied to all welded steels. Over a few tenths of a second, the beam of rays allows to melt the emitted metal powders and metalworking them together with the base material. The properties of coating materials, cobalt base materials or hard metal base materials are very good, although the layers are very thin.

Therefore, although the field of application of this method is wide, especially when local and high precision coating is required, it can be interesting in layers from 0.2 mm to 2 mm. In addition, the low use of welding or coating materials allows a significant improvement in economic costs.