Laser Cladding of Alumina Material Coating: Effects on Deposition Quality

Alumina ceramic is a high performance engineering material with excellent properties, including high melting point, high hardness and brittle nature make the alumina ceramic difficult to machine and needing high cost by using conventional manufacturing methods. Coating is an important method for alumina fabrication. The excellent properties of coatings can be used for special surface protection and ceramic parts repairing. Comparing with other coating methods, laser cladding method has many good properties to overcome the drawbacks. The reported investigations on laser cladding provide little information about alumina materials for ceramic coating. In this paper, effects of different input variables of laser cladding of alumina materials for ceramic coating were studied. And this paper for the first time reported the relationship between the properties (including surface roughness, flatness and powder efficiency) and input variables such as laser power, powder feeding rate and laser head moving rate. The obtained results will be helpful to establish efficient and effective processes for ceramics coating.