Hardness, wear and corrosion properties of Co-Cr-W alloy deposited with laser engineered net shaping in medical applications

Abstract

Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) is promising metal additive manufacturing process used to build near net shape and functionally graded materials. Co-Cr-W alloy samples are fabricated in order to identify the best suitable process parameters for best performing hardness, wear and corrosion resistance to the LENS deposited samples as per the Taguchi L-9 orthogonal array and analysis is carried through the ANOVA and Grey Relational Grade Analysis (GRGA) method. From the experiments, it is identified that the performance of the samples with reference to the above properties is highly influenced by the process parameters. High laser power (350W), moderate powder feed rate (7.5g/min) and high scan speed (20mm/sec) are the optimized process parameters for best performing samples for all the three properties. Further, it draws from the analysis that the influence of the process parameters for laser power (66%), powder feed rate (22%) and scan speed (6%) on best suitable samples for medical applications.