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Surface cleaning of 34CrMo4 steel pipes by using pulsed fibre laser

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Abstract

This paper deals with the laser cleaning of 34CrMo4 steel pipes to be adopted before the electrical upsetting process. The cleaning aims to decrease the pipes’ roughness and the coupled electrical resistance with copper inserts to achieve lower wear and obtain an overall better electrical contact between the pipe and the copper inserts. Compared to a traditional process (shot blasting), the results showed that the laser cleaning treatment leads to a lower pipe roughness and a lowered wear of the copper inserts. The first experimental tests were conducted by using a 30-W Q-switched Yb:YAG fibre laser with different cleaning parameters such as scan speed, pulse frequency, and hatch distance to identify a workability range. Successively, a three-level full factorial plan was developed, and results were analysed through the analysis of variance (ANOVA) to understand which parameters were significant during the cleaning process. Also, the cleaned samples were compared to shot-blasted ones to evaluate the percentage improvements in terms of surface roughness, wear resistance, and coupled electrical resistance. In the third phase, a pre-industrialisation analysis was performed by adopting higher laser power sources (50–100 W) to reduce the cleaning time and define a possible industrial setup. It was found that with the laser cleaning treatment the surface quality increases (about 10 times lower Ra and Rz compared to shot blasting), with a decrease of the wear of about 22%. Moreover, the laser cleaning treatment improves the electric contact resistance and reduces the initial variability compared to the as-rolled sample.

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Data availability

The processed data generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This study was partially supported by an academic grant (Funding program VALERE assigned to Emanuele Mingione) from the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. The authors are particularly grateful to the Interuniversity Research Centre CIRTIBS for the equipment and the financial support to develop the present research work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Enterprise Engineering Mario Lucertini, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Silvio Genna

  2. Department of Engineering, Università Degli Studi Della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Via Roma, 9, 81031, Aversa, Italy

    Claudio Leone & Emanuele Mingione

  3. CIRTIBS Research Centre, University of Naples Federico II, P.Le Tecchio 80, 80125, Naples, Italy

    Silvio Genna & Claudio Leone

Authors
  1. Silvio Genna
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  2. Claudio Leone
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Contributions

All the authors contributed equally to the various aspects of this work: Claudio Leone: conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, resources, supervision. Emanuele Mingione: investigation, writing—original draft, data curation, visualisation. Silvio Genna: conceptualisation, investigation, data curation, formal analysis.

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Correspondence to Emanuele Mingione.

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Genna, S., Leone, C. & Mingione, E. Surface cleaning of 34CrMo4 steel pipes by using pulsed fibre laser. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 125, 231–244 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-022-10648-8

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