Cladding as a repair process is making a significant contribution to industries such as mining and oil & gas, where metal components are subject to huge stress in daily operations. Laseline diode lasers have been installed in workshops across Australia to meet this demand.
As experts in thermal spray technology, QSP Engineering specialises in the reclamation, repair and resizing of worn components, with the company servicing clients come from a wide and diverse range of industries including the mining, construction, earth-moving, marine and industrial sectors. QSP’s large workshop in Bethania, Queensland, allows the team to repair small items such as respraying household irons to repair and reclamation of very large parts worn and corroded through excessive and heavy usage – for example, pivot shafts.
Over 40 years of successful operations, the company has built a range of services to meet the needs of its clients, resulting in a highly trained team with expertise in spraying techniques. QSP offers high-velocity oxy fuel spraying (HVOF), arc spraying, ceramic and plasma spraying.
The latest laser technology has now been added to this mix, with a Laserline system that allows QSP to offer reliable finished workpieces. With a laser, exposure time is short and the cooling is very quick, allowing the material to be metallurgically connected, pore-free and crack-free, in a single operation, while keeping post-processing to a minimum. This process results in laser cladding being particularly tough, well suited to large items such as oil & gas drills and tanks. These can be repaired with long-term stable linings to reach required safety standards.
For customers engaged in oil extraction, mining, metal and paper industries, where part replacement is costly or can take months to replace, the use of cladding to repair large expensive equipment is seen as an economic, time-saving solution. Additionally, coatings by laser-based high-speed powder cladding provide maximum impermeability combined with a long lifetime, making them superior to other coating techniques such as thermal spraying.
Australia boasts a number of oil & gas fields where high-performance drilling operations put tools under tremendous stresses. When presented to a workshop using a Laserline LDF or LDM diode laser for repair, economic and dependable results can be achieved, in most cases even extending the original projected life of a part.