Development of a model for the simulation of laser surface heat treatments with use of a physical simulator

Nowadays, laser hardening is a sufficiently mature process to be industrially applied as a substitute for traditional heat treatments that are more expensive and less flexible. The bottleneck of the process is the difficulty in pre-determining the proper laser parameters able to produce the desired hardness depth and profile into the work-piece without trial and error tests which are very time consuming. To overcome this limitation and to increase the diffusion of laser hardening in industry, a low time consuming but accurate model of the laser hardening process is presented in this paper. The process simulation is able to determine the hardness depth in both single and multiple passes, considering tempering effects in the overlapping zones. The experimental procedure for the evaluation of thermo-dynamic parameters governing micro-structural transformations is also explained. The proposed process simulation can be used for two and three-dimensional analyses indistinctly and has been validated in the present work on an industrial benchmark (the surface hardening of an AISI 9840 cam).