Successfully completed doctorate
On 24 September 2020, Dr Pierre Landgraf successfully defended his dissertation entitled „Microstructure and hardness development in the laser beam treatment of high-alloy tool steels“. The successful completion of the doctoral programme was again achieved through a combination of face-to-face and online elements.
Using Chemnitz University of Technology's Big Blue Button conference system, numerous other guests were able to follow Dr Landgraf's presentation in addition to the doctoral committee present. His research work began with the realisation that the laser beam hardening of high-alloy tool steels, particularly thin components, had been little researched. In addition, no numerical simulations of laser beam hardening had yet been applied to high-alloy tool steels. Both shortcomings served Dr Landgrafs as motivation for his work. It should be noted that the locally occurring hardening process parameters vary depending on the temperature field during laser beam hardening, which has a direct influence on the solubility of alloying elements in the heated state and thus on the resulting microstructure after the self-quenching process. These temperature field-dependent variations had to be taken into account for the successful numerical simulation of laser beam hardening of high-alloy steels, as standard FE material models do not take these dependencies into account. As a result, however, Dr Landgraf was able to successfully close this gap for two selected, frequently used high-alloy tool steels. For the first time, he was able to make an almost exact simulative prediction of the hardness levels and hardening depth curves of the analysed materials as a result of laser hardening processes with different process parameters.
The work will soon be published under the IWW's own publishing house in the series „Werkstoffe und werkstofftechnische Anwendungen“ and in the Qcosa portal of Chemnitz University of Technology.
Picture:
Prof Thomas Lampke (doctoral supervisor and first reviewer), Dr Pierre Landgraf, Prof Thorsten Halle (second reviewer) and Prof Michael Groß (head of the doctoral procedure)
8 Oct 2020 – Personnel of the professorship ( thomas.grund@mb… )
