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CuCr/Cu contact material fabricated via high-speed laser cladding

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Abstract

As one of the most widely used contact materials, CuCr alloys put forward higher requirements for their comprehensive properties, especially the resistance to arc erosion under the demand of miniaturization. In this work, a hetero-structured CuCr/Cu contact with metallurgical bonding was successfully fabricated by high-speed laser cladding. The fabrication process was investigated, and the optimized process window was determined. The CuCr layer is free of cracks and contains about 48 wt.% Cr. The average size of Cr particles is 0.82 μm, and the Cu grains grow epitaxially across the CuCr/Cu interface. The shear strength of the interface is as high as 223.3 MPa. The hardness of the aged CuCr layer is much higher than the commercial CuCr alloy, while both materials have similar electrical conductivities. The aged CuCr/Cu contact has the lower arc erosion rate and the wear rate than the commercial CuCr contact. The excellent performances of the CuCr/Cu contact are attributed to the hetero-structure design and the metallurgical bonding.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2021YFB2500600) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11725210, 51827810, and 51977193).

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  1. Hongbin Xie and Weimian Guan contributed equally to this study.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Hongbin Xie, Weimian Guan, Hao Lv, Mingyu Gao, Huiya Yang & Jiabin Liu

  2. Center for X-Mechanics, Faculty of Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Hongbin Xie, Weimian Guan, Hao Lv, Mingyu Gao, Huiya Yang, Youtong Fang, Jiabin Liu & Hongtao Wang

  3. College of Engineering, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 321004, China

    Xinying Liu & Weiping Dong

  4. Key Laboratory of Urban Rail Transit Intelligent Operation and Maintenance Technology & Equipment of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 321004, China

    Weiping Dong

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  1. Hongbin Xie
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Contributions

Hongbin Xie: investigation, data curation, writing—original draft, review, and editing. Weimian Guan; methodology, writing—original draft, review, and editing; Hao Lv: visualization; Mingyu Gao: resources; Xinying Liu: data curation; Huiya Yang: validation; Youtong Fang: conceptualization; Jiabin Liu: conceptualization, writing—review, and editing; Weiping Dong: data curation and supervision; Hongtao Wang: conceptualization and supervision.

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Correspondence to Jiabin Liu, Weiping Dong or Hongtao Wang.

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Xie, H., Guan, W., Lv, H. et al. CuCr/Cu contact material fabricated via high-speed laser cladding. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 124, 397–410 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-10487-7

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