Sliding wear resistance of TiCp reinforced titanium composite coating produced by laser cladding

Titanium metal matrix composite coatings (MMC) are considered to be important candidates for high wear resistance applications. Laser cladding (LC) by coaxial powder feeding is an advanced coating manufacturing process, which involves laser processing fine powders into components directly from computer aided design (CAD) model.In this study, the LC process was employed to fabricate TiC particle reinforced Ti6Al4V MMC coatings on Ti6Al4V hot rolled samples.The experimental results show that during LC process, TiC particles are partially dissolved into melted Ti-base alloy and precipitated in the form of TiC dendrites during cooling.Dry sliding wear properties of these MMC layers have been compared with substrate materials wear. The observed wear mechanisms are summarized and related to detailed microstructural observations. The layers have been found to show improved tribological properties connected with the TiCp addition and the LC process parameters.