Surface heat treatment of U8 steel by Nd:YAG laser

Abstract

The feasibility of laser surface hardening of U8 steel using a Nd:YAG continuous wave laser has been shown in this work. With the present trade literature reviewed and the experimental procedure we developed an outline of the process parameters determination methodology. It is found that in spite of the limitations and over-simplification of the experiment, an average explanation of the observed phenomena can be made to illustrate the parameters operation limits. The operation limits of the three principal parameters when hardening U8 steel are described, and it is shown that the depth of hardening is closed correlated with the incident power on the specimen (P), the diameter of the laser beam (d) and the scan velocity by P√dν . The experiment was arranged statistically and the surface hardness of U8 steel can be increased to values above 500 HV in a deep of 0.15 mm.