Lasers in Green Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

A safe and healthy work piece is important for sustainable manufacturing process. Green laser surface hardening is a heat treatment process on a part of its application does not use water or oil as quenching media, because it is self-quenching and less detrimental to the environment. Since it is an energy saving process it is fast being adopted by manufacturing industries. Quenching media used in conventional heat treatment process for a sudden cooling of the heated work piece to get hard structure transformation. Unfortunately the reactions of quenchant with hot working also have several negative health, production cost, and environmental impact.This paper focuses the experimental investigation into the roller of green surface hardening on energy saving, the production cost of the industrial components. A comparative study of surface hardening under conventional and laser sources was conducted using similar components. The results show that the quality of hardening improved in laser hardening but the process time increased marginally at one stage and reduced at other shapes of manufacturing. In analyzing the process cost laser hardening show cast saving notably.

Sustainability in manufacturing processes: practices performed in metal forming, casting, heat treatment, welding and electrostatic painting

“…Another factor is that, unlike conventional ovens that must be kept at high temperatures during shutdowns, the laser's ignition energy is close to zero. All this leads to a high energy efficiency and, consequently, lower environmental impact (Balasubramanian et al 2014).…”