Correlation between temperature distribution and formed microstructure of in-situ laser cladding of Fe-TiC on carbon steel

One of the unique aspects of in-situ laser cladding is to create a uniform clad by melting the powder and a thin layer of the substrate to form a composite of pure powder components with minimal dilution. Therefore, this technique can be an excellent candidate for hardfacing process by deposition of multiple clad beads side by side on a low cost base material. Since TiC has desirable properties such as hardness, wear and corrosion resistance, in this work, the hardfacing process of AISI 1030 carbon steel using titanium (Ti) and graphite (C) as a composite coating material (i.e., Fe(Ti)-TiC) is investigated using a numerical and experimental analysis. In order to study the microstructure of the TiC morphology and distribution in the clad, a 3D time-dependent numerical model and ternary phase diagram are used to interpret the experimental results along with the temperature distributions formed throughout the deposition process. The morphology and distribution of TiC particles are studied by means of SEM, XRD.