Materials Letters 210 (2018) 46–50

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Materials Letters
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mlblue

Crack-free Fe-based amorphous coating synthesized by laser cladding

Yunzhuo Lu a,⇑, Guokun Huang a, Yongzhe Wang b,⇑, Hongge Li a, Zuoxiang Qin a, Xing Lu a
a
School of Materials Science and Engineering, Dalian Jiaotong University, Dalian 116028, People’s Republic of China
b
Institute of Advanced Wear & Corrosion Resistance and Functional Materials, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, People’s Republic of China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Laser cladding of crack-free Fe-based amorphous coatings remains a challenge due to their intrinsic brit-
Received 18 August 2017 tleness and the generation of huge thermal stress during the laser process. In this paper, we have applied
Received in revised form 23 August 2017 a triple laser scanning strategy, which incorporates a first laser scan to heat the substrate, a second laser
Accepted 24 August 2017
scan to produce amorphous coating, followed immediately by a third laser scan to in-situ release the
Available online 1 September 2017
thermal stress formed within the amorphous coating, to prevent the generation of crack during the laser
cladding of an Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 amorphous coating. The microstructure and wear resistance of the
Keywords:
crack-free Fe-based amorphous coating were also examined.
Amorphous materials
Crack
Ó 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Laser cladding
Wear and tribology

1. Introduction [14,15]. An important consideration for utilizing these thermal

The discovery of metallic glasses (MGs) has stimulated wide-
spread research enthusiasm because of their technological promise
for practical applications and scientific importance in understand-
ing some longstanding issues of amorphous solids [1]. Among the
explored metallic-glass systems, Fe-based MGs are of considerable
interest for their practical applications due to not only the abun-
dant natural resources of Fe element but also the unique combina-
tion of the relatively low material cost, and superior physical/
mechanical properties, such as high strength and excellent mag-
netic properties [2–4]. However, the poor plasticity at room tem-
perature and small dimensions in the region of only tens of
millimeters severely limit their applications as structural and func-
tional materials [5,6]. To break through the application restriction,
exploiting attainable Fe-based MGs as two-dimensional coatings is
the most preferred way, since manufacturing coatings would not
be limited by the size [7,8]. Moreover, the Fe-based MGs of excel-
lent corrosion resistance, high hardness, and good abradability are
good candidate for wear and corrosion resistant coating on metal-
lic components [9].
Nowadays, there are several methods used to produce amor-
phous coatings, such as thermal spray-based techniques and the
laser cladding. The thermal spraying techniques include high
velocity oxy-fuel spraying (HVOF) [7,10,11], high velocity air
fuel (HVAF) [10,12], arc spraying [13] and plasma spraying
⇑ Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses: yunzhuohit@gmail.com (Y. Lu), hitwangyz@163.com (Y. Wang).
spray-based techniques for amorphous coatings is the high cooling
rates achieved, which is an important prerequisite for retaining the
amorphous structure. However, the bonding strength between the
amorphous coating and the substrate is poor, which limits the
applications of amorphous coatings in harsh conditions. By com-
parison, due to the partial melting of substrate, the amorphous
coatings produced by laser cladding exhibit excellent metallurgical
bonding to the substrates [16,17]. At the same time, the cooling
rates achieved by this method can generally reach the values on
the order of 103–104 K/s, which is significantly higher than the crit-
ical cooling rate required to produce an amorphous structure for
most MGs. Thus, the laser cladding is an ideal method for fabricat-
ing metallurgically bonded amorphous coatings.
Most modern laser cladding techniques use a coaxial powder
feed nozzle positioned around a defocused laser arranged perpen-
dicular to the substrate, as illustrated in Fig. 1(a). The defocused
laser forms a melt pool on the surface of the substrate and the
coaxially fed powder stream adds material to this pool. This results
in swelling of the melt pool and the formation of a raised track. By
incorporating movement of the substrate and the laser cladding
head, coating can be built up. However, due to the temperature
gradient and its related plastification induced by locally concen-
trated energy input and rapid heating/cooling during the laser pro-
cessing, there will be serious thermal stresses within the deposited
coating [18,19]. Fig. 1(b) shows a typical schematic describing
thermal stress within the coating fabricated by laser cladding
[20]. A tensile stress at the bottom and a compressive stress at
the top are formed within the coating. This thermal stress is

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matlet.2017.08.125
0167-577X/Ó 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 Y. Lu et al. / Materials Letters 210 (2018) 46–50
Fig. 1. (a) Schematic of most modern laser cladding techniques. (b) Typical
schematic describing thermal stress within the coating fabricated by laser cladding.
widely-known to cause cracks in many coatings [21,22]. This
thermal-stress induced crack is more serious when producing
amorphous coatings due to the intrinsic brittleness of MGs. For
ductile materials, when the thermal stress exceeds the yield stress,
the thermal stress can be released through the plastic deformation.
However, for brittle MGs, cracks will initiate when the thermal
stress exceeds the yield strength. Then in order to prevent the for-
mation of cracks in amorphous coatings, it is necessary to either
enhance the yield strength of the MGs or decrease the thermal
stress. Since the yield strength is an intrinsic material property,
reducing the thermal stress is the most feasible way to obtain
crack-free amorphous coatings for a given amorphous
composition.
Recently, Li et al. have successfully prevented the propagation
of cracks during the selective laser melting of an Al-based bulk
metallic glass composites by using a high power initial laser scan
that designed to melt the material followed by a lower power re-
scan that can release the thermal stress [20]. Inspired by this work,
in the present study, a crack-free Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 amor-
phous coating was successfully fabricated by using the laser clad-
ding. To prevent the crack formation in this Fe-based amorphous
coating, a triple laser scanning strategy was applied which incorpo-
rated a first laser scan to heat the substrate, a second laser scan to
produce amorphous coating, followed immediately by a third laser
scan to in-situ release the thermal stress formed within the amor-
phous coating. The microstructure and wear resistance of the
crack-free Fe-based amorphous coating were also examined.
2. Experimental
Laser cladding of Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 amorphous coating
was performed with coaxial powder feeding laser solid forming
system equipped with a 6000 W fiber laser. The diameter of laser
beam was 3 mm. Laser solid forming experiment were conducted
47
inside a working chamber, which is filled with argon to keep
the oxygen level lower than 10 ppm. Argon atomized
Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 powder in a size range of 30–100 lm was
used for the laser cladding process. The powder stored in the
powder hoppers was fed through four coaxial nozzles by argon
flow and injected into the melt pool created by the laser beam.
The powder was delivered into the laser molten pool with the
rate fixed at 20 g/min. In order to obtain continuous deposited
layers, parallel tracks were partially overlapped, with an overlap
fraction of 30%. The 45 steel plates with the dimensions of
50 mm  50 mm  7 mm were used to act as substrates during
laser cladding process. The substrate surfaces were ground
with 600 grit SiC papers and thoroughly cleaned in ethanol
prior to laser processing. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
equipped with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), and
X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used for the microstructure charac-
terization and phase analysis of the gas-atomized powders and
as-sprayed Fe-based alloy coatings.
To evaluate the wear resistance of the Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10
amorphous coating, dry sliding wear tests were performed with a
reciprocating ball-on-plate tribometer (UMT-3, Center for Tribol-
ogy) at ambient conditions using commercially available Al2O3
balls as the counterparts. Before the tests, all samples were pol-
ished to mirror finish in order to obtain identical surface rough-
ness. A sliding speed of 0.04 m/s, applied load of 30 N, and
overall sliding distance of 70 m were applied in the experiments
and the friction coefficient was continuously recorded during the
test. New balls were used for each test. The wear volume loss
was calculated using the equation of V = S  d where V is the wear
volume (mm3), S is the cross sectional area (mm2) of the worn sur-
face, d means the overall sliding distance (mm), respectively. Each
area value is the average of four measurements conducted in the
different positions of the wear track.
3. Results and discussion
Fig. 2(a) shows a typical macroscopic appearance of the
Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating fabricated by traditional single laser
scan at a laser power of 2000 W and scan speed of 600 mm/min.
Fig. 2(b) shows the XRD profile of this Fe-based amorphous coating
using Cu-Ka radiation. As shown in this figure, there is a broaden
peak in 2 theta region of 40–50°, but there are still a few sharp
crystal peaks in the XRD patterns, indicating the existence of a
mixture of the amorphous and some crystalline phases in the
deposited Fe-based amorphous coating. Many previous results
have found that the crystallization is hard to be avoided in the laser
deposited metallic glasses, since the heating rates in the heat-
affected zone is lower than the critical heating rate required to
avoid crystallization [23,24]. Thus, in the present study, the depos-
ited Fe-based amorphous coating is not fully amorphous. This can
be confirmed by the typical magnified back-scattering morphology
presented in Fig. 2(d). Numerous dark crystals embedded in the
gray matrix can be observed. As presented in Fig. 2(a), some
macro-cracks can be found at the surface of the sample. The micro-
scopic secondary-electron image of the cross section perpendicular
to the laser travel direction is shown in Fig. 2(c). We can find that
the cracks propagate throughout the entire amorphous coating.
To prevent the crack formation in this Fe-based amorphous
coating, a triple laser scanning strategy was applied. In order to
decrease the thermal stress, we firstly scanned the substrate by
using the laser to reduce the temperature gradient. The laser power
was 600 W, and the travel speed of the laser beam relative to the
substrate surface was 200 mm/min. The parallel laser tracks were
partially overlapped, with an overlap fraction of 30%. Soon after
48 Y. Lu et al. / Materials Letters 210 (2018) 46–50

Fig. 2. (a) A typical macroscopic appearance of the Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating fabricated by traditional single laser scan at a laser power of 2000 W and scan speed of
600 mm/min. (b) XRD profile of this Fe-based amorphous coating using Cu-Ka radiation. (c) Microscopic secondary-electron image of the cross section perpendicular to the
laser travel direction. (d) Typical magnified back-scattering morphology of the Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating.

this procedure, an Fe-based coating was deposited on the heated
substrate by using a laser power of 2000 W and scan speed of
600 mm/min. Immediately after this step, a third laser scan with
a laser power of 1400 W and a scan speed of 360 mm/min was
applied to in-situ release the thermal stress formed within the
Fe-based coating. The macroscopic appearance of the obtained
Fe-based coating is shown in Fig. 3(a). There is no apparent
macro-crack can be found at the surface of this sample. To check
whether there is still no crack inside the deposited coating, we
magnified the cross section of the coating perpendicular to the
laser travel direction. As presented in Fig. 3(c), the coating obtained
by the triple laser scanning strategy is indeed crack-free. The XRD
pattern of this coating is shown in Fig. 3(b). Some sharp diffraction
peaks from the crystalline phase superimposed on the halo peak
from the matrix amorphous phase is found in this figure, confirm-
ing the mixture of amorphous and crystalline phases in the depos-
ited coating. A typical magnified back-scattering morphology of
this coating presented in Fig. 3(d). As shown, the crystallinity of
this triple laser scanned coating is more serious than that of the
single laser scanned coating. This is because a higher substrate
temperature induced by the first laser scanning reduces the heat
transfer from the substrate and results in a lower cooling rate
[25]. Moreover, the third laser track will accumulate the structural
relaxation for the Fe-based amorphous coating formed at the sec-
ond laser track. The accumulated structural relaxation can make
the crystallinity of already formed crystalline regions become more
serious [26].
Fig. 4(a) shows the variations of friction coefficients during dry
sliding of the deposited Fe-based amorphous coating and the steel
substrate. Clearly, steady state wear is obtained after a short slid-
ing distance of less than 25 m for the Fe-based amorphous coating,
with the averaged friction coefficient around 0.45. However, the
wear process of the steel substrate is unstable, accompanied by
numerous waves, suggesting that the deposited Fe-based amor-
phous coating can keep a low wear loss for a much long service
time. The average wear volumes of the deposited Fe-based amor-
phous coating and the steel substrate after the completion of slid-
ing tests are shown in Fig. 4(b). The schematic of the wear test is
presented in the inset of this figure. It can be seen that the average
wear volume of the deposited Fe-based amorphous coating is
much lower than that of the steel substrate, demonstrating that
the wear resistance of the deposited Fe-based amorphous coating
is much superior to the steel substrate.
4. Conclusions
The crack-free Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 amorphous coatings have
been successfully prepared by laser cladding technique. To prevent
the crack formation in this Fe-based amorphous coating, a triple
laser scanning strategy was applied which incorporated a first laser
scan to heat the substrate, a second laser scan to produce amor-
phous coating, followed immediately by a third laser scan to in-
situ release the thermal stress formed within the amorphous coat-
ing. The deposited Fe-based amorphous coating exhibits a stable
wear process and a low wear loss for a much long service time
under dry sliding wear condition, which is much superior to tradi-
tional crystalline 45 steel.
 Y. Lu et al. / Materials Letters 210 (2018) 46–50 49

Fig. 3. (a) A typical macroscopic appearance of the crack-free Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating. (b) XRD profile of this crack-free Fe-based amorphous coating using Cu-Ka
radiation. (c) Microscopic secondary-electron image of the cross section of the crack-free Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating. (d) Typical magnified back-scattering morphology of
the crack-free Fe37.5Cr27.5C12B13Mo10 coating.

Fig. 4. (a) Variations of friction coefficients during dry sliding of the crack-free Fe-based amorphous coating and the steel substrate. (b) Average wear volumes of the crack-
free Fe-based amorphous coating and the steel substrate after the completion of sliding tests.

Acknowledgements China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No.

2015M570242, and Basic Research Project of Key Laboratory of
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foun- Education Department of Liaoning Province under Grant No.
dation of China (NSFC) under Grant Nos. 51401041 and 51671042, LZ2015011.
50 Y. Lu et al. / Materials Letters 210 (2018) 46–50

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