Microstructure, hardness and stress in melted zone of 42CrMo steel by wide-band laser surface melting

► Laser surface melting is an advanced and highly efficient manufacturing method and has very wide applied perspective in mechanical engineering and industry manufacturing. ► However, stressed-skin construction of the melted zone is one of the predominant factor that deserve a careful study. It is very difficult and costly to select the optimum parameters by experiment, The Finite Element methods may be helpful to solve the problem. ► In this paper, a new appropriate wide-band heat source model was created, and used for calculation in the FE code. ► The calculation results (temperature distribution, residual stress distribution and metallurgic transformation analyses were performed) coincide well with experiments and some regularities were obtained, which is useful for the experiment.