Design characteristics and development of a nozzle for coaxial laser cladding

J. Lin and W. M. Steen

Citation: Journal of Laser Applications 10, 55 (1998); doi: 10.2351/1.521821

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 JOURNAL OF LASER APPLICATIONS VOLUME 10, NUMBER 2 APRIL 1998

Design characteristics and development of a nozzle for coaxial laser

cladding
J. Lin and W. M. Steen
Department of Engineering, University of Liverpool, P.O. Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom
~Received 10 June 1997; accepted for publication 23 December 1997!
Laser cladding by blowing powder into a laser generated melt pool is finding greater use in industry
particularly with the growing interest in direct build and repair techniques currently being
investigated. The process is traditionally done with a side blown powder feed. This has the
limitation of not being omnidirectional. To overcome this, a coaxial powder feed system has been
developed. This article describes a particular system by both mathematical models and experiment.
The system has so far achieved a catchment efficiency of up to 40% with a 1 kW CO2 laser beam.
The parameters controlling this important commercial parameter are described. They include the
flow structure of the powder in the beam. The control of this structure is discussed with reference
to this particular coaxial flow system. © 1998 Laser Institute of America.
@S1042-346X~98!00402-1#

Key words: coaxial nozzle, laser cladding, catchment efficiency, powder flow

INTRODUCTION
The laser cladding process has been investigated over
the past decades. It is one of the advanced techniques for
surface treatment possible with a laser.1 In laser cladding the
clad layer can be applied as a powder, foil, or wire with the
objective of improving the corrosion, wear, or cosmetic
properties of the object being clad as well as applications
such as repair and rebuild. In powder systems the powder
can be preplaced or blown into the laser generated melt pool.
The blown powder route is one of the rare processes which is
capable of giving a fused bond with low dilution over large
or small areas. It has thus found applications in industry and
is the subject of much research around the world. Most work
to date has used an off axis powder feed system to avoid the
powder melting and sticking to the feed nozzle or oxidizing
prior to cladding. However a coaxial feed would make this
promising process omnidirectional and therefore easier to
use. This would open up new possibilities for repair and for
the newly developed laser direct casting process ~LDC!.2–4
In this new technique, three-dimensional ~3D! metal compo-
nents can be directly built from a computer aided design
~CAD! drawing, suggesting a new route for low volume
manufacturing.
Some attempts have been made to operate coaxial pow-
der feeders in which the powder interacts with the beam just
outside the nozzle or to feed the powder from symmetrically
placed external pipes creating a central powder flow.5,6
These systems gave a coaxial feed but with poor powder
focus or some solidification within the nozzle assembly.
There was also a problem with the heat balance during pro-
longed periods of processing.
In this article a novel coaxial design is studied. The de-
sign has been successfully used for LDC and behaves as a
‘‘metal pencil,’’ capable of making uniform deposits in any
direction. In this article the nozzle characteristics are deter-
mined through a numerical simulation. The influence of the
shielding gas on the jet flow and the catchment efficiency
was analyzed by both theory and experiments. Flow visuali-
sation with image analysis is used to check this simulation
and some initial studies are reported on the effects of flow
parameters on the catchment efficiency and degree of powder
focus. The powder used in the tests was stainless steel 304L
powder. Clad trials were performed on a mild steel substrate
with a 1.0 kW cw CO2 laser with a constant table speed of 10
mm/s.
COAXIAL CLADDING NOZZLE
The design of the coaxial nozzle structure is illustrated
in Fig. 1. The design specification included compact size,
efficient energy interaction between the laser beam and the
powder outside the nozzle assembly, and shrouded gas flow
which would tend to focus the powder stream.
The nozzle is composed of three separate parts: the cen-
tral hole through which the laser beam and shield gases pass;
the surrounding annular zone into which the powder flows
and is blown out by its carrier gas as a cone into the laser
beam outside the nozzle; and an outer annular gas jet. The
beam focus is set at the nozzle exit so that the powder inter-
acts with an expanding beam whose focal length is 150 mm
~;8° divergence!. An inert gas, such as argon, is blown
through the inner and the outer nozzles to protect the focus-
ing lens and prevent powder oxidation. A water jacket was
used to remove the heat from the nozzle for a prolonged
working life.
FLOW VISUALIZATION
Two methods were used to visualize the powder stream
coming from the coaxial nozzle. The first method filmed the
light scattered from an incident 2D light beam which illumi-

1042-346X/98/10(2)/55/9/$15.00 55 © 1998 Laser Institute of America

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 56 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998 J. Lin and W. M. Steen

FIG. 2. Photograph from the CCD camera by plane light illumination at a

stand-off distance S520 mm for U 0 54 m/s and U 1 52 m/s.

The concentration of the cold powder stream in the

transverse direction was analyzed from the image of the
CCD camera with a 45° projection angle to the stream center
with a stand-off distance of 20 mm. The variation of the
luminance intensity along the center line of the image was
analyzed by the OPTIMAS software. From Eq. ~1!, the lumi-
nance intensity will correlate to the powder concentration
distribution due to the light scattering at the low powder
concentration considered here. Figure 4 shows volumetric
distributions of the powder concentration at different gas set-
tings. It is seen that the powder distribution was significantly
FIG. 1. Coaxial powder feed nozzle for laser cladding. affected by the change in the inner and outer jet velocities.
The second method used the scanning device shown in
Fig. 2. A scanning powder sensor device based on a photo-
nated a single section across the flow; the second measured detector with He/Ne laser ~3 mW! was designed to measure
the powder stream opacity by scanning a He/Ne laser beam the spatial distribution of the powder concentration. The
across the stream. The objective was to measure the powder powder sensor received the radiation energy generated by the
stream divergence and the powder distribution within that He/Ne laser beam through the powder stream. A voltage sig-
stream. nal drop from the silicon photodiode due to the light extinc-
The first method used a charge coupled device ~CCD! tion by the powder stream could be detected. Since the out-
video camera with a framing speed of 50 frames/s. This cam-
era was focused onto the particles flowing from the nozzle
which were illuminated by a 2D sheet of light from a fiber
optic and a tungsten lamp formed by passing the beam
through a cylindrical lens. The sheet thickness was 2
60.5 mm in the framing area. A typical image from the
CCD camera is shown in Fig. 3. Image analysis gave the
variation in intensity across the powder stream.
The luminance intensity L is in proportion to the number
of particles illustrated per unit area. This is equal to the par-
ticle density at each radial location and the path distance
through the stream as well as the image size being analyzed.
Assuming a Gaussian powder distribution within the stream,
then the intensity would be ~meaning of symbols given in
nomenclature!
r 2p n 2/s2
L} e 22y . ~1!
s
Measurements were made for various inner and outer gas FIG. 3. Luminance intensity distribution from the image analysis on the
velocities varying from 2 to 8 m/s. The particles were stain- cross section of the powder stream under different compound jet velocity at
less steel 75630 m m with an average flow rate of 0.05 g/s. S520 mm.
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 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998
FIG. 4. Experimental setup for powder concentration measurement.
put signal linearly depends on the light intensity falling in
the sensor, this intensity drop could be evaluated by
Bouguer–Beer law as expressed in Eq. ~2!7
I5I o exp~ 2nAEl s ! .
Scanning results were collected for a cold powder stream
with various shielding gas velocity. The inner and outer gas
velocities were set by controlling the gas flow rate into the
coaxial nozzle. The sensor was located at variable stand-off
distances and scanned along the transverse direction. The
receiving intensity drop due to the light transmitted through
the powder stream was very clear in Fig. 5. The powder
distribution along the longitudinal and transverse axes was
affected by the gas velocity.
INFLUENCE OF THE SHIELDING GAS ON THE
POWDER STREAM STRUCTURE
The powder distribution was evaluated by image analy-
sis of the results of flow visualization. Images from the CCD
camera of the scattered intensity of the powder stream indi-
cate the powder concentration and powder stream width, as
shown in Fig. 4 made with different jet velocity settings. The
results of the scattered intensity and the intensity drop on the
photosensor show similar distributions of the powder con-
centration for the transverse sections. The data from the pho-
todetector need to be weighted by a volumetric factor due to
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J. Lin and W. M. Steen 57
FIG. 5. Signal output from powder scanning sensor at the inner jet velocity
of ~a! U 0 52 m/s, U 1 52 m/s; ~b! U 0 54 m/s, U 1 52 m/s.
the nonuniform powder distribution along the He/Ne laser
beam direction as discussed previously. Figure 6 shows a
Gaussian curve for the concentration measurements made by
the photosensor and the CCD camera. The stream structures
with different shielding gas settings were also analyzed. The
results of the luminance intensity of the powder stream mea-
sured by the CCD camera could be interpreted as the volu-
~2! metric concentration of the powder distribution from which
the stream divergence angle could be measured. Both the
spraying angle of the cold and hot powder stream were mea-
sured. Here the hot stream is defined as the inner region of
powder stream heated by the laser beam and is usually lo-
cated at the center of the stream. According to the image
analysis of the powder stream and its concentration distribu-
tion, the powder spraying angles with various settings of the
gas velocity in the inner and outer jets were measured and
shown in Fig. 7. The spraying angle increases with inner and
outer gas velocities.
To realize the reasons for the shield gas effects, a nu-
merical simulation was used in this study. A 2D axisymetri-
cal powder stream problem in the cylindrical coordinate sys-
tem was simulated by the commercial FLUENT package. The
governing equations used here are the equations of mass con-
servation and momentum conservation for both argon gas
and dispersed stainless steel particles. The standard k2 e tur-
bulence flow model was adapted in this computation in solv-
ing the compound jet problem. Without heat radiation from
the laser, typical computational results ~Fig. 8! show the
change of the powder concentration along the longitudinal
axis from the nozzle exit. The distribution of powder con-
 58 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998 J. Lin and W. M. Steen

FIG. 6. Normalized concentration distribution from ~a! scanning powder FIG. 7. The stream angle change with variable velocity of the compound
sensor, ~b! CCD camera to assure a Gaussian mode of the powder stream jets for ~a! cold stream, ~b! hot stream.
spraying.

centration at different radial position is shown in Fig. 9. The

distribution is similar to a Gaussian distribution with a re-
duction of the powder concentration due to an increased ve-
locity of shield gas. The faster the stream the less density per
unit volume for a given mass flow rate. It should be noted
that the peak value of the powder concentration is near the
jet center and the nozzle exit. The concentration is reduced
further downstream due to the divergence of the powder
stream which is affected by the inner and outer jets.
The intruding effect of shield gas on the powder stream
structure was very clear from the experiments and the nu-
merical simulation. The most important parameter of com-
pound jets is the relative velocity between the inner and
outer streams or the ratio between the initial velocity of the
compound jets and the surrounding gas.8 Depending on the
velocity ratio, compound jets may be referred to as either
weak or strong. Generally speaking, strong jets mix much
faster than weak ones due to the propagation of the flow
shear zone caused by the different velocities between the
jets. In the case of a jet with high-velocity gradients in the
fringes to the center, the more shear stress is created, the
faster the shear layer propagates toward the center and the
outer region. The increase of the inner jet momentum will
further diffuse the turbulent flow, and the particle dispersion
rate is significantly enhanced by increasing the mean veloc-
FIG. 8. The influence of the compound jets velocity on the distribution of
ity of the turbulent flow. Typical results are the particle con- powder concentration along the beam axial direction at center of powder
centration drop and the flow field expansion.9 stream.
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 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998 J. Lin and W. M. Steen 59

FIG. 9. The influence of the compound jets velocity on the distribution of powder concentration along the stream radial direction.

THERMAL PROFILE IN THE POWDER STREAM ing heating. This implies an infinite thermal conductiv-
ity, k, such that k@h, where h is the particle to gas heat
The process to be modeled consists of a stream of pow- transfer coefficient.
der particles falling in an expanding laser beam. The power ~3! Latent heat effect is neglected in this analysis.
distribution within the laser beam will be one of the specified
structures, typically Gaussian mode, and thus a given particle In general, the motion of the particle is determined by the
may be subjected to a changing power density as it falls in fluid forces acting on it as described by Eq. ~3!. However this
the beam. On impact with the substrate to be clad, the par- ignores the heating effects of the gas adjacent to the particle
ticle will either adhere and form a clad or bounce off. The which would in practice cause significant gas expansion af-
mechanism determining which event occurs is not clearly fecting its velocity and direction
understood but is expected to include whether the particle or dV 3 m C D Re
the substrate or both are molten. It is felt that a solid/solid 5 ~ U2V ! 1g. ~3!
interaction will most probably result in a ricochet. The one dt 4 r p D 2p
exception could be that the substrate is sufficiently hot to The drag coefficient C D of the flow is expressed in Eq. ~4!
melt the particle during the impact time. Thus the points of for Re,1000:
interest in this system for laser cladding are the distance from
the nozzle at which the powder melts, the temperature of the 24
C D5 ~ 110.15 Re1.687! . ~4!
particle and substrate at the impact point, and the velocity of Re
the particle upon impact.
Some modeling of such problems has been done for the The Reynolds number, Re, is defined in the usual way in Eq.
plasma spraying process10 and little for the laser cladding. ~5!:
Some of this analytic work included solving the equations of r u U2V u D p
conservation for mass, momentum, and energy at high tem- Re5 . ~5!
m
peratures. This level of analysis was not considered neces-
sary for this problem. Here a simplified approach is dis- The change in the particle temperature is obtained from an
cussed to solve the thermal profile of the coaxial powder energy balance on the particle as expressed in Eq. ~6!:
stream based on the following assumptions:
dT p 6Nuk 3eI
~1! The particle is spherical with constant absorptivity to 5 2 ~ T g 2T p ! 1 . ~6!
dt D pr pC p 2 r pD pC p
10.6 mm radiation and is moving in a uniform jet flow
and a uniform radiation field. The Nusselt number for a spherical particle moving in a gas
~2! The internal temperature of the particle is uniform dur- stream is expressed as Nu5210.6Re0.5Pr0.33. 10 The geomet-
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 60 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998 J. Lin and W. M. Steen

tion. The significant cooling effect by convection is seen

from the powder temperature in the downstream of the flow
for various gas flow velocities. At the start of the laser inter-
action, the temperature of the particle will rise rapidly near
the nozzle exit due to the strong laser radiation. After that the
temperature discrepancy between the powder and gas will
induce a significant convection cooling and the particle tem-
perature will drop with decreasing laser intensity on the par-
ticle.

TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENT OF THE HOT

FIG. 10. The particle temperature distribution along the beam axis under PARTICLES
variable jet velocity with an initial particle velocity of 2 m/s.
An experimental arrangement for the temperature mea-
surement of the dispersed particles was developed in this
ric relationship among the beam intensity I, beam power P, study. Figure 11 illustrates the basic concept of the tempera-
the stand off distance S, and beam divergence angle w could ture detector used. A photodiode with pin-hole tube ~diam-
be expressed as Eq. ~7!: eter of 100 mm and view angle about 4°! was designed to
catch the radiation from the particles in front of a hot powder
P stream. When a solid particle is injected into a laser beam, it

F SD G
I5 . ~7!
w d8 2 is heated by the optical energy. Its temperature can reach as
p tan S1 high as a few thousand degree Kelvin depending on the op-
2 2
erating conditions, the thermal properties, the size and the
As an example, the beam power of 1 kW with absorptivity of velocity of the particle, and the gas velocity in the jet flow.
0.4 on a stainless steel particle of 75 mm and initial velocity According to Planck’s law,11 the heated surface will radiate
V 0 52 m/s under varying inner jet velocity was used. The over a wide range of wavelengths depending on the surface
calculated results of a moving particle under laser radiation temperature and emissivity. Here we assume the particle be-
are shown in Fig. 10. It could be found that particle heating haves as a grey body. The radiation energy detected by the
is mainly determined by the beam focus of the laser radia- photodiode on the particle surface will correlate to its

FIG. 11. ~a! Particle temperature measured by a pin-hole photo detector. ~b! Calculated temperature of the tungsten lamp with various electric power input.
~c! The voltage response of the photo diode with various lamp temperatures.
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 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998
FIG. 12. Typical signal output and temperature distribution from the pin-
hole sensor on the powder stream under 1 kW laser interaction with U 0
54 m/s, U 1 50 m/s at S510 mm.
temperature. The location of the pin-hole sensor on the par-
ticle surface decides the type of the heat source. In our case,
the heating area of the particle is similar to the target area of
detector if the sensor head is located near the flying particle
stream. In such a condition, a single particle may be treated
as an extended heat source to the detector and the response
of the sensor is independent of the background radiant
energy.11
The calibration of the detector involves finding a corre-
lation between the particle temperature and the pulse ampli-
tude for a fixed particle diameter. In practice, particles with a
known temperature and diameter and a suitable velocity are
not available. Therefore they have to be simulated. The sys-
tem employed to simulate the stream of particles comprises a
pin-hole, a tungsten ribbon lamp, and a chopper. The pin-
hole, imitating the particle, is placed over the sensor tube
head. The lamp with a known relationship between the fila-
ment temperature and the input power is substituted as the
source of radiation. The chopper with a constant speed is
placed between the sensor and lamp to imitate a hot particle
in flight for temperature calibration. The relationship of the
tungsten filament temperature and the input power of the
lamp is calculated by the Stefan–Boltzmann law of the
blackbody radiation.11 The calibration curves of the lamp
temperature and the voltage response of the photodiode are
plotted in Fig. 11.
Figure 12 shows a typical measurement on the powder
stream taken for a sample of 400 acceptable particle tem-
peratures in a powder stream with 1 kW laser interaction.
The mean temperatures of the powder stream along the beam
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J. Lin and W. M. Steen 61
axis was measured and plotted to compare with the calcu-
lated data as shown in Fig. 10.
It can be seen from the experimental and the analytical
results that the insertion point of the powder stream into the
beam is critical, since it determines the maximum possible
temperature. The melting distance of the powder flow can
also be evaluated from Eqs. ~3!–~7!. According to the results
in Fig. 10, a proper selection of the stand off distance is
based on the stream temperature which should be up to the
melting point of the particle to trap on the substrate. This
distance is obviously a function of the laser power and flow
rate.
POWDER CATCHMENT EFFICIENCY
The performance of the coaxial nozzle for cladding is
mainly based on its ability to deliver powder which forms a
clad with the correct metallurgical qualities. The main per-
formance criterion is the catchment efficiency, h. This is
defined as the ratio of the powder trapped in the formed clad
to the powder delivered. It is considered probable that the
powder which is caught has either impacted with a liquid/
solid interaction or it melted during the very brief time it was
in contact with the surface. For cladding of stainless steel on
mild steel, the melting points of both materials are similar
and hence it is unlikely that a solid particle arriving on a
solid surface will melt during impact. This leaves the only
option that clad would form if either the powder particle or
the surface or both were molten at the point of impact. With
the coaxial nozzle all three alternatives are possible. For clad
forming before the particles have melted the catchment effi-
ciency will be mainly determined by the ratio of the laser
generated melt area to the impact area of the powder
stream.12
According to the results from flow visualization, the
Gaussian distribution of the powder concentration will pro-
vide sufficient information to estimate the theoretical catch-
ment efficiency from the area relationship between the melt
pool and the powder stream. Some assumptions should be
made in this analysis. The diameter of powder stream and the
melt pool are assumed to be linear functions of the spraying
angle and the stand-off distance. The ratio of the clad width
to the stream diameter is expressed in Eq. ~8!. The clad width
is treated as the same size as the beam diameter and in-
creases with stand-off distance. This is reasonable for a short
stand-off distance (S,203R 0 ), after which the pool size is
smaller due to the falling power intensity
d ~ d 8 1S tan w !
5 . ~8!
D ~ D 8 1S tan u !
According to the Gaussian distribution of the dispersed pow-
der on the spraying area, the catchment efficiency could be
evaluated by integrating the volumetric powder concentra-
tion on the clad area to the spraying area. It could be ex-
pressed as Eqs. ~9! and ~10!:
1 2
f ~ z !5 e 22 z , ~9!
A2 p
 62 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998
FIG. 13. The relationship between the powder catchment efficiency and the
diameter ratio d/D of the clad to powder stream for Gaussian mode distri-
bution.
h SD
d
D
5
* z d f ~ z ! pz d z
* z D f ~ z ! pz d z
, ~10!
where z d 5d/ s and z D 5D/ s , s is the stream diameter cov-
ering a portion of 68% of the concentration in the section
plane.
Equation ~9! can be rearranged as Eq. ~10! if a stream
diameter is selected as D53 s ( z D 53). This new definition
of the stream diameter will cover 99.8% of the concentration
in the section plane and it will be much more accurate in the
calculation of catchment efficiency using the Gaussian dis-
tribution mode
2 laser power and flow rate.
h 512e 22 z d . ~11!
The numerical relationship of Eq. ~11! between the catch-
ment efficiency and the diameter ratio (d/D) of the clad to
the powder stream is shown in Fig. 13. It can be found that
the catchment efficiency will be increased with d/D and ap-
proaches 80% at d/D51.5. In our optics setting and nozzle
size the d 8 /D 8 is about 0.26 and it could be substituted in
Eq. ~8! to calculate the value of d/D through the beam axis.
An important relationship between the catchment efficiency
and geometric parameters of stand-off distance and spraying
angle was established in Fig. 14. The catchment efficiency is
compared to the experimental data with varying spraying
FIG. 14. The effect of the stream angle on the catchment efficiency for both d 8:
theoretical and experimental approaches.
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J. Lin and W. M. Steen
angle. It is seen that the spraying angle and the initial diam-
eters of the powder and laser beam will significantly affect
the catchment efficiency. In our case, the reduction of the
spraying angle, which is controlled by the velocity of the
compound jets, will increase the catchment efficiency up to
40% at the spraying angle of about 10° for both inner and
outer gas velocities of 2 m/s.
CONCLUSIONS
This study demonstrates a nozzle design to improve jet
spraying on clad surfaces. The omnidirectional ability of the
coaxial nozzle will provide a possible technique for rapid
prototyping applications. The interaction between the laser
beam and the powder concentration should be strictly con-
trolled to achieve an efficient cladding process. The control-
ling of the exit jet of the powder stream is seen as a possible
way to improve its efficiency.
The Gaussian mode of the powder distribution in coaxial
cladding jet flow was obtained by both experimental and
numerical approaches. Further evidence from the photosen-
sor and plane beam image analysis supported the same con-
clusion. This provided a basic distribution of the powder
stream to estimate the catchment efficiency as a function of
the shield gas effects.
The theoretical study of the single particle heating in a
laser beam was verified by the temperature measurement ob-
tained using a pin-hole sensor. The thermal profile of the
powder stream determines the stand-off distance for a proper
clad setting. This melting distance is a strong function of the
The velocity of the compound jet will determine the
stream shape and hence the catchment efficiency. The melt
pool arising from the laser spot will have a diameter propor-
tional to the beam diameter up to the point where the power
density fails to melt. This will give a peak value in the pow-
der catchment as a function of the stand-off distance for
small spraying angles. Considering the Gaussian distribu-
tions of the powder streams, it gives an approximated for-
mula for the catchment efficiency h up to 40% in our nozzle
design. This formula was verified by experimental measure-
ments.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due to Dr. W. O’Neill and Dr. G.
Shannon of the University of Liverpool for their invaluable
suggestions to this work, which is under the LEMA ~Laser
Engineering for Manufacturing Applications! project spon-
sored by EPSRC, UK.
NOMENCLATURE
A: mean particle cross section area of the particles
CD : drag coefficient of the flow
cp : particle specific heat
Dp : particle diameter
d: laser beam diameter
D: powder stream diameter
effective initial beam diameter
D 8: effective initial stream diameter
 J. Laser Appl., Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1998 J. Lin and W. M. Steen 63

E: extinction coefficient z: ratio of laser beam diameter to powder stream

f ( j ): Gaussian normal error function diameter
g: acceleration due to gravity s: stream diameter to the e 21/2 position of the powder
h: heat convection coefficient distribution
I: intensity of the laser light beam r: density of the gas flow
Io : initial intensity of the laser light beam e: absorptivity of the particle surface
w laser beam divergence angle
k: thermal conductivity of the gas
u spraying angle of the powder stream
L: luminance intensity
h powder catchment efficiency
ls : distance of the light passing
n: average number of the particles per unit volume
Nu: Nusselt number 1
W. M. Steen, Laser Material Processing ~Springer, Berlin, 1993!.
2
J. L. Kock and J. Mazumder, Rapid Prototyping by Laser Cladding, Pro-
P: laser beam power ceedings of ICALEO, 1993, pp. 556–559.
Pr: Prandtl number 3
M. Murphy, C. Lee, and W. M. Steen, ‘‘Studies In Rapid Prototyping By
Re: Reynold number Laser Surface Cladding,’’ Proceedings of ICALEO 1993, pp. 882–891.
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