Application of Taguchi-based gray relational analysis for evaluating the optimal laser cladding parameters for AISI1040 steel plane surface

The effect of various laser cladding process parameters like laser power, scan speed, and powder feed rate on clad bead quality characteristics (or clad bead geometry) for AISI 1040 steel substrate have been studied by performing a number of experiments with L (9) orthogonal array. In order to find the process parametric setting for best quality clad bead based on experimental results, a multiresponse optimization technique using gray relational analysis (GRA) is presented in this paper. The GRA is applied on laser cladding process to find out the gray relational grade for each experiment. On optimization, power of 1.25 kW, scan speed of 0.8 m/min, and a powder feed rate of 11 gm/min have been found to be the best parametric setting for laser cladding operation of AISI 1040 steel substrate. Moreover, the analysis of variance is also performed to determine the contribution of each control factor on the clad quality characteristics. Finally, to ensure the robustness of GRA, a confirmatory test is performed at selected optimal parametric setting.