Development Of A Powder Feeder With Carrying Gas For Lase Cladding Directed Shaping

Rapid Prototyping & technology is one kind of new manufacturing technology based on material accumulation in which emerged the 1980?s. It integrates in Mechanical Engineering, CAD, Numerical Control, optics and material science. By using it, 3D object can be fabricated directly from CAD models automatically and rapidly without any part-specific tooling. This technology is widely used in the product design and rapid evaluation, modification and function test, which effectively reduced the period of research and design.Metal powder laser-cladding directed shaping technology breaks the traditional limtion of technics and materials,because of shaping the metal function part directly,people call it real RP,more and more people research it in RP field.Dimension precision and surface quality of the mental function part is most important for metal powder laser-cladding directed shaping technology.Powder feeder feeds the mental powder into the melting pool,that it?s formed by high powder,quality of laser cladding depends on the precision and stability of powder feeding,very tiny change of powder feeding can induce visible change of shape,quality of cladding layer.So,people look the powder feeder as the center part of the metal powder laser-cladding shape technology and research it largely in domestic and international.In the paper, I introduce the development of the RP and mental powder directed shaping technology first,then discuss the powder feeder using now on the base of laser-cladding theory and gas feeding,integrate the mechanical design and mechanical control,research a new gas powder feeder. The powder feeder is a gas turnplate powder feeder.PCI1240 movement control card drives the walking electromotor ,the electromoter drive the coaxial worm(The worm connects with the axis of the electromoter by flexible coupling),the worm drive the coxial worm wheel of the turnplate.The powder in the powder barrel distributes in the groove of the turnplate equably. The pressure of the gas in the cavity feeds the powder when the powder in the groove turns to the powder exit.At the experiment stage,lots of tests of pneumatic powder transport are done for evaluating the capability and the data of the device with Ni60A and 316L steel powder and ideal effect has been achieved. I do the laser cladding test on the A3 steel-plate used MPLS laser machining center of RP labrary.ShenYang Institute of Automation,Chinese academy of sciences.Analyzed the technics parameter of affect the quality of the laser cladding and powder utilization, confirm the best technics parameter,I made two function part successfully using the best technics parameter,proved the powder feeder has good ability of powder feeding.It can assure the demand of the metal powder laser-cladding directed shaping technology.