Laser cladding of phosphor bronze

Phosphor bronze is a suitable bearing material because of its good fatigue strength and excellent wear properties under corrosive conditions, high temperatures and high loads. Bronze is usually continuously cast as bar or tube and machined into bushes, cam followers, washers or other bearing components. It is common to mount bronze bushes around shafts by means of warm shrink fitting. Laser Cladding is a manufacturing process to generate a dense a metallurgical bonded coating over a substrate and it can be employed to deposit a phosphor bronze coating directly over a shaft improving its wear properties. In this paper, the feasibility of the Laser Cladding to produce phosphor bronze coatings on alloy steel is demonstrated. Suitable processing parameters to generate phosphor bronze coatings are presented. The hardness of the bronze coating obtained is 172 ± 12 HV, 56% higher than the one reported for cast bronze. Finally, Laser Cladding is proposed as a method to create a bronze surface in an area of a shaft as a substitute of warm shrink fitting of machined bronze bushes.