A sequential method to determine the surface absorptivity in the process of laser surface hardening

•The paper presents a sequential method to estimate the absorptivity in laser surface hardening.•The obtained result by the proposed method is in agreement with that by Wang et al. [8].•The obtained result by the proposed method is higher than that by Chen and Wu [9].

A sequential method is adopted to estimate the surface absorptivity in the process of laser surface hardening in this paper. The experimental temperature data given by Wang et al. [8] is used to verify the applicability of the proposed method. The results indicated that the proposed method is able to estimate the surface absorptivity accurately in the process of laser surface hardening.