What is the difference between plasma cladding and plasma surfacing?

In fact, plasma cladding and plasma surfacing belong to the same technology, but the name is different, there is no difference.

This technology is also called plasma spray welding, which is a cladding method that uses plasma arc as a heat source to melt the filler metal and make it bond with the base metal as a metallurgical bond. Plasma cladding technology has the characteristics of energy saving and stable quality, making it one of the important green manufacturing and remanufacturing technologies.

Plasma cladding began to be used in industrial applications in the 1960s. It uses the plasma generated between the tungsten electrode of the welding torch as the negative electrode of the current and the substrate as the positive electrode of the current as heat, and transfers the heat to the surface of the workpiece to be welded, and sends the welding powder to the heat energy area to make it After melting, it is deposited on the surface of the workpiece to be welded, so as to realize the cladding process of strengthening and hardening the surface of the part.

Plasma cladding technology has the advantages of high productivity, beautiful appearance, and easy mechanization and automation of the cladding process.

Comparison of plasma cladding and other cladding technologies:

1. Compared with argon tungsten arc welding, plasma cladding has strong penetration depth controllability, high deposition speed, and higher productivity. After cladding, the interface between the base material and the cladding material is in a metallurgical bonding state. High bonding strength, low heat input and low dilution rate.

More importantly, because the tungsten electrode has a poor ability to carry current, a larger current in argon arc welding will cause the tungsten electrode to melt and evaporate, and its particles may enter the molten pool and cause pollution, while plasma cladding The tungsten electrode needs to withstand a small current.

2. Compared with manual arc welding, although it is slightly inferior in application flexibility and convenience, in terms of production efficiency, the welding torch shows obvious advantages, and manual arc welding has greater labor intensity, which affects the health of welders and product quality Affected by the level of welders and the quality of welding rods.

3. Compared with submerged arc welding, it has greater flexibility in welding position.

In addition, the plasma arc itself has the advantages of concentrated heat in the arc center, stable arc, and low dilution rate.

With the development of automatic control technology, PLC control is introduced in more and more stack cladding equipment, so as to achieve accurate control of the important parameters of stack cladding such as arc voltage, current, powder feeding amount, swing amplitude and swing frequency. In addition, Introducing a numerical control system into the stack cladding system can control the walking speed of the welding gun and the movement of the workpiece. By adjusting the number of stack cladding, the thickness, width and hardness of the stack cladding can be freely adjusted within a certain range.

4. Compared with other surfacing welding, during the plasma cladding process, there is less mutual fusion between the base material and the cladding material, and the characteristics of the cladding material change little;

In addition, the use of powder as the stack cladding material can increase the freedom of alloy design and make the stack cladding cladding material possible, thereby greatly improving the wear resistance, high temperature resistance and corrosion resistance of the workpiece. Therefore, plasma cladding is widely used in new product manufacturing and equipment remanufacturing in petroleum, chemical, engineering machinery, mining machinery and other industries.

If you have any other questions about plasma cladding technology, you can directly contact the editor of Shanghai Duomu Industrial Company for answers!