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The aim of the present work is to investigate the feasibility and effects of a selective post-deposition laser treatment on titanium coatings. Commercially pure titanium grade 2 powders were deposited by means of a cold spray process on aluminum alloy AA2024-T3 sheets. The surface treatment of the coating was realized using a 220 W diode laser. The influence of heat input and dimensional features of coating layer and substrate was assessed by an experimental campaign conducted following a design of experiments approach. Optical and scanning electron microscopy analysis of the microstructure of the deposited and treated material as well as micro hardness measurements showed the formation of a compact layer of titanium oxide on the coating surface and the preservation of the temper state of the aluminum substrate.

The incremental forming of titanium alloy sheets combines the advantages of this advanced flexible manufacturing process, that allows to produce complex components without using dedicated tools, with the interesting properties of the material under consideration. In this study, thin sheets of grade 1 titanium were incrementally formed to evaluate their formability and surface quality by varying the tool-sheet contact conditions. Experimental tests and surface analyses highlight dependence on the contact conditions of the surface quality rather than of the formability. Moreover, they emphasize that the tool-sheet contact conditions mainly affect the repeatability of the process due to the occurrence of galling.

This paper deals with the study of the laser marking process of titanium cold sprayed coatings on aluminium substrates. Despite several studies regarding the laser marking process are available in literature very few attention have been paid to the marking of cold sprayed coatings and there are no previous papers in literature. Also the phenomena occurring during the marking of a porous coating are to date not fully understood and will be discussed in this paper. The experimental campaign was also repeated on grade 2 titanium rolled sheets with a thickness of 2 mm. The marking tests were carried out under different experimental conditions varying the main process parameters (i.e. laser pulse power and laser scan speed), after that the mark sections were observed by optical microscope and SEM. Both the maximum penetration depth and width of the marks were acquired and also internal damages induced by the process were studied. A correlation between the process parameters and the mark's geometry was found. The results show the effectiveness of the laser process to produce high quality marks on both the titanium layer and the titanium sheet. Moreover, a higher mark penetration on Ti coating was observed compared to the Ti sheet. However, the results show also the possibility to introduce severe and hidden damages in both materials if the process parameters are not properly set.

Cemented carbides, also known as Widia, are hard metals produced by sintering process and widely used in mechanical machining. They show high cutting capacity and good wear resistance; consequently, they result to be excellent materials for manufacturing cutting tools and sandblast nozzles. In this work, the wear resistance of WC-Co carbides containing Eta-phase, a secondary phase present in the hard metals when a carbon content deficiency occurs, is analyzed. Different mixtures of carbide are prepared and sintered, with different weight percentages of carbon, in order to form Eta-phase and then analyze how the carbon content influences the wear resistance of the material. This characterization is carried out by abrasive wear tests. The test parameters are chosen considering the working conditions of sandblast nozzles. Additional information is gathered through microscopic observations and the evaluation of hardness and microhardness of the different mixtures. The analyses highlight that there is a limit of carbon content below which bad sintering occurs. Considering the mixtures without these sintering problems, they show a wear resistance depending on the size and distribution of the Eta-phase; moreover, the one with high carbon content deficiency shows the best performance.

Nowadays, the need of developing high flexible forming processes matches with the need of weight reduction. In this light, the incremental forming of titanium alloys sheets can guarantee both these aspects by combining the flexibility of the process, particularly suggested for small batches and customized parts, with the good properties of titanium alloys, in particular for aerospace applications.The aim of this work was to obtain information useful to enhance the general knowledge of the hot incremental forming processes of grade 1 titanium sheets at different temperatures.First, both tensile and straight groove tests were carried out by varying the test temperature; in this phase, information regarding both the forming forces and the wear phenomena due to the tool-sheet contact was acquired.Successively, on the basis of the mechanical characterization of the sheets previously carried out, explicit analyses, effectuated by a non-linear FE code, allowed to determine the formability curves of the sheets for the different temperatures.

The use of hybrid structures made of CFRP and titanium alloys is growing more and more in the last years in the aerospace industry due to the high strength to weight ratio. Because of their very different characteristics, the mechanical fastening represent the most effective joining technique for these materials. As a consequence, drilling process plays a key role in the assembly. The one shot drilling, i.e. the contemporary drilling of the stack of the two materials, seems to be the best option both in terms of time saving and assembly accuracy. Nevertheless, due to the considerable different machinability of fiber reinforced plastics and metallic materials, the one shot drilling is a critical process both for the holes quality and for the tools wear. This research was carried out to study the effectiveness of new generation tools in the drilling of CFRP/Titanium stacks. The tools are made of sintered grains of tungsten carbide (WC) in a binder of cobalt and coated with Diamond like carbon (DLC), and are characterized by a patented geometry; they mainly differ in parent WC grain size and binder percentage. Both the cutting forces and the wear phenomena were accurately investigated and the results were analyzed as a function of number of holes and their quality. The results show a clear increase of the cutting forces with the number of holes for all the used drilling tools. Moreover, abrasive wear phenomena that affect initially the tools coating layer were observed. © 2016 Author(s).

Welding is a joining procedure that offers some benefits over mechanical fasteners such as weight reduction and absence of notches induced by machining operations. Adversely, welding generally involves heating the two parts to be joined, but heating can entail local modifications with loss of material characteristics. The welded zone may also include defects such as gas bubbles, or spurious materials with deleterious effects on the material strength and durability. Thus, each welded joint should be non-destructively tested for quality assurance. In the present work two kinds of joints, lap and butt, are analysed. The joints are obtained from both similar and dissimilar materials, which are plates of AISI304 and AISI430. Two different autogenous (i.e. without filler material) fusion–welding processes are employed, which are the conventional tungsten inert gas (TIG) and the CO 2 laser beam. Joints are investigated with destructive and non-destructive techniques to evaluate the presence and the extension of the so-called heat-affected zone and/or the occurrence of defects. Non-destructive evaluation is performed with infrared lockin thermography and results are compared to macrographs and micro-hardness destructive measurements.

Cold Gas Dynamic Spray is an emerging coating technology based on the use of a supersonic gas jet to accelerate (up to 1000 m/s) and to impact a powder, with size ranging from 1 to 50 μm in diameter, on a substrate. Due to the high speed, during the impact, the powder undergoes a severe plastic deformation such that it adheres on the substrate. Thanks to this method, it is possible to produce up to fully dense metallic coatings on substrates of different materials. With this technology, different kinds of powder (metals, polymers, ceramics, composite materials and nanocrystalline powders) or their mixing can be deposited. Among the various possible powders that can be deposited by cold spray, titanium is one of the most attractive materials thanks to its potential applications. A titanium layer produced onto a softer materials (i.e. aluminium alloys) could improve both the corrosion resistance and the wear properties of the components. However, the coating made with this technique could be affected by several problems, such as porosity, high roughness and low mechanical properties. A possible solution for this issues is the use of laser remelting post-deposition treatment. The present investigation deals with the application of a continuous wave diode laser in order to change the coating properties and metallographic structure. With this aim, laser remelting of a titanium cold sprayed layer were carried out on samples of grade 2 titanium alloy, 5 mm thick, obtained by cold spray technique, by using a 220 W diode laser at different scan speed. In order to avoid the influence of the particular substrate, the laser remelting process was carried after the detachment of the coating from the substrate. After laser treatments, light and SEM microscopy were carried out to analyze the geometry of remelted zone and the evolution of its microstructure morphology. Moreover, micro-hardness measurements were made to evaluate the mechanical properties. Three different metallurgical structures corresponding to the remelted zone, the heat affected zone and base material were observed. The remelted zone showed an elliptical shape, with a depth up to 0.7 mm and a martensitic microstructure. Furthermore, in this zone, hardness higher than the base material (more than threefold) was found. In conclusion, it is possible to affirm that the laser remelting is a promising technique to improve the superficial properties of titanium cold sprayed layers.

In the manufacturing of metal components both wear and corrosion have to be considered. In particular, corrosion is a primary problem in the aeronautic field, where the aluminium alloys are affected by several corrosion typologies. Furthermore, nowadays carbon fibre reinforced plastics (CFRP) are finding an increasing use, but they can induce galvanic corrosion phenomena when coupled with aluminium alloys. To overcome this problem, corrosion resistant coatings are used on aluminium components. On these premises, the realization of a titanium coating on aluminium components could allow the coupling of CFRP and aluminium alloys, improving the corrosion resistance. Cold Spray Deposition is a recent technology to realize these coatings. This technology allows the production of near fully dense coatings on metallic surfaces. In many applications the coated aluminium sheets have to be machined (cut or drilled). Machining with conventional cutting methods leads to both tool wear and damages in the coating. Laser cutting represents a promising alternative: it does not involve any mechanical cutting force or tool wear and, thanks to the small laser beam spot, it allows to realize complex shapes. In this paper, laser cutting of an Al alloy sheet (0.6 mm thick) coated with Ti Alloy, was studied. The adopted laser source was a 150 W, lamp pumped Nd:YAG, specifically developed for micro-machining operations on metals. During the tests, the process parameters (cutting speed, pulse duration and entrance side) were changed and the kerf geometry was analysed as a function of the process parameters.

Superficial coatings are widely used in industrial applications in order to improve the superficial properties of metallic components. In particular, in the aeronautic field, all the components are coated in order to prevent both corrosion and wear. In this field, heat treatable aluminum alloys, in age hardened condition, are used; consequently, superficial coatings must be carried out through “cold” processes, i.e. coating processes in which the component to be coated remains at low temperatures, below 100°C. Cold gas dynamic spray technique (CGDS) is a process of deposition that consists in the realization of surface coatings with high-velocity metal particles sprayed on the substrate at temperature significantly lower than the melting one of the substrate itself and at relatively low temperatures if compared to other spray techniques. When processing conditions are optimized, the process can produce near fully dense coatings. This technique could be particularly useful in the coating of rolled sheets, needing of successive cold plastic deformations. One of the cold plastic processes is incremental forming, a high flexible process for rapid manufacturing of complex sheet metal part shapes; it presents the potential to be easy to automate and particularly attractive for small batches and customized parts. In this process, a simple tool describes a path that allows to locally deform the sheet clamped along its periphery. The aim of this paper is to study the evolution and behaviour of aluminum coating deposed by CGDS on AA 2024-T3 sheets carried out by an incremental forming process. This evaluation is carried out by characterizing the cold sprayed coating after the forming process for different wall angles of simples geometries.

Weld imperfections are tolerable defects as stated from the international standard. Nevertheless they can produce a set of drawbacks like difficulty to assembly, reworking, limited fatigue life, and surface imperfections. In this paper Ti6Al4V titanium butt welds were produced by CO2laser welding. The following tolerable defects were analysed: weld undercut, excess weld metal, excessive penetration, incomplete filled groove, root concavity, and lack of penetration. A neuro-fuzzy model for the prediction and classification of the defects in the fused zone was built up using the experimental data. Weld imperfections were connected to the welding parameters by feed forward neural networks. Then the imperfections were clustered using the C-means fuzzy clustering algorithm. The clusters were named after the ISO standard classification of the levels of imperfection for electron and laser beam welding of aluminium alloys and steels. Finally, a single-value metric was proposed for the assessment of the overall bead geometry quality. It combined an index for each defect and functioned according to the criterion “the-smallest-the-best.”

Titanium and its alloys are nowadays widely used in many sectors: in the medical field (orthopedic and dental ones), in the architectural field, in the chemical plants field and in aeronautic [1]. In this last field it is more and more used both for its contribution to make lightweight and time durable structures and for its compatibility with new materials, first of all Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP). Cutting of titanium sheets is one of the primary requirements in the fabrication of most of the components. Laser cutting offers several advantages over conventional cutting methods. It includes narrow kerf width (minimum material lost), straight cut edges, low roughness of cut surfaces, minimum metallurgical and surface distortions, easy integration with computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines for cutting complex profiles and importantly non-contact nature of the process (suitable for cutting in hostile environments and in areas with limited access) [2]. However, due to very limited literature available on laser cutting of titanium, it is very difficult to predict the cut surface quality and optimum process parameters for laser cutting, especially when dross-free cuts are required. Laser cutting of titanium and titanium alloys needs to be carried out with an inert gas, this due to the high reactivity of the titanium with the oxygen at high temperatures [3]. However when the available power is limited, as in the present case, the use of a reactive gas (air) can help to achieve cutting speed value reasonable for industrial applications. The aim of this work is to study the cutting of Ti-6Al-4V rolled sheets 1 mm in thickness, by means of a 100 W fibre laser, (SPI-Red Power) working at wavelength  = 1090 nm. The maximum cutting speed were measured in both CW and pulsed regime at different mean power and different duration. Furthermore, the kerf geometry and the heat affected zone (HAZ) were studied decreasing the cutting speed from the maximum to the 80 % of this values. The results obtained showed that both the power and the cutting speed influence the cutting kerf geometry and HAZ. In particular the synergy of power and speed, resulting roughly into the heat input, seems to rule the whole cutting process.