Laser cladding equipment consists of laser source, cooling unit, powder feeding mechanism, working table and so on.
The laser cladding equipment is usually selected as CO2 laser source, solid laser source (fiber laser source, disc laser source, diode laser source).
CO2 laser source is the most widely used and most widely used laser. It is widely applied in the automotive industry, iron and steel industry, shipbuilding industry, aviation and aerospace industry, motor industry, machinery industry, metallurgical industry, metal processing and other fields. It accounts for about 40% of global industrial laser sales and 70% in North America.

1.Power is high. CO2 laser source is one of the current lasers with the highest output power to the highest level, and its maximum continuous output power can reach hundreds of thousands of watts.
2.The efficiency is high. The photoelectric conversion rate is over 30%, which is much more efficient than the other processing lasers.
3.Beam is of high quality. The model is good, the coherence is good, the line width is narrow, and the work is stable.
The traditional solid state laser source is usually pumped with high power gas discharge lamp, and its pumping efficiency is about 3% to 6%. A large amount of energy emitted from the pump lamp is transformed into heat energy, which not only causes the solid laser need to use a heavy cooling system, but also a large amount of heat energy can cause the thermal lens effect which can not be eliminated by the working material and make the beam quality worse. In addition, the life of the pump lamp is about 400 hours. The operator needs to spend a lot of time to change the lights frequently and interrupt the system to make the efficiency of the automatic production line greatly reduced. Compared with the traditional lamp pumped laser source, the solid laser source (fiber laser source, disc laser source, diode laser source) has the following advantages:
1.High conversion efficiency: the absorption peak emission wavelength and solid laser material of semiconductor laser is consistent, and the pump model can be well matched with the laser oscillation mode, thus the optical conversion efficiency is very high, has reached more than 50%, and the efficiency can also be quite a carbon dioxide laser. Order of magnitude higher than lamp pumped solid laser and diode pumped laser with small volume and light weight, compact.

2.Reliable performance, long service life: the life of the laser diode is significantly longer than a flash, up to 15000 hours, the energy stability of the pump, than can the magnitude of flashlamp pumped, reliable performance, for the whole curing device, is so far the only without the maintenance of lasers, especially for large-scale production line.
3. The output beam quality is good: because of the high conversion efficiency of diode pumped laser, the thermal lens effect of laser working material is reduced, and the output beam quality of laser is greatly improved, and the quality of laser beam is near the limit.
4. Fast speed, large depth, no deformation, no slag in cladding layer and no pores in molten pool.
5. It can be operated at room temperature or under special conditions. For example, after laser passes through a magnetic field, the beam will not deflect. It can be used in vacuum and clad through glass and transparent material.
6. Thin wall laser cladding can be carried out with no deformation in the matrix.
But if the cladding materials, including powder and parent material, high reflective material, fiber laser, diode laser is due to its own characteristics of the design, it is not very suitable, and is more suitable for disc laser welding (including cladding), cutting high reflectivity material.