Laser Cladding Robot: From Hardfacing to ABB Cells

A worn pump shaft, a scored hydraulic rod or a chipped turbine part does not always have to be scrapped. It can be built back up with new metal and machined to size. For a century that was a welder's job. Today a laser cladding robot does much of it, laying a thin, dense layer of alloy powder exactly where the wear is. This post covers how hardfacing welders rebuilt parts by hand, how lasers took over in aero engines, what a September 2026 brake disc prototype shows about the process now, and where ABB robots carry the cladding head, turn the part and finish the surface.

A laser cladding head with powder lines deposits metal on the rim of a round part at Lasertherm in the Czech Republic. Photo: Lucie Prokešová / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How welders hardfaced worn parts by hand

Rebuilding worn steel is old work. Railroads, mines and farms kept welders busy building up rail ends, crusher jaws, dredge cutters and ploughshares rather than buying new parts. The methods were the ones every welding shop had: an oxyacetylene torch, a stick electrode, later submerged arc and plasma arc. The welder laid beads of a harder alloy over the worn area, then ground the surface back to shape. Quality depended on the welder's hand and eye, and on how much heat the part could take before it warped or cracked.

Mike Evans, a welder at the Chicago and North Western railroad's Proviso yard repair tracks, April 1943. Photo: Jack Delano, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The filler metals got better first. Elwood Haynes patented his cobalt and chromium Stellite alloys in 1907, and Stellite became a standard hardfacing material for valve seats, cutting edges and other parts that wear. Nickel based alloys and chromium carbide followed. The payoff could be large: one study of farm equipment found that arc hardfacing roughly doubled the life of ploughshares. The weakness was the process. Arc welding melts a lot of the base metal, which dilutes the hard layer, and the heat can distort a precise part such as a shaft or a turbine blade.

A welder hardfaces an extruder screw by hand to make it resist wear, 2020. Photo: Lreames / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lasers dealt with both problems. A focused beam melts a thin skin of the base metal and the powder or wire fed into it, so the new layer bonds metallurgically with little mixing and little heat in the part. Aerospace led. Rolls-Royce in the UK was an early user of laser cladding to repair the high-pressure turbine blades of RB211 engines, and the idea of a laser-clad coating on turbine blades was patented in 1981. Because the cladding head has to follow the part's shape at a steady speed and distance, the process moved onto CNC machines and robot arms almost from the start.

A Rolls-Royce RB211 turbofan, the engine whose turbine blades Rolls-Royce repaired with early laser cladding. Photo: Dr. S. G. Hooker, Rolls-Royce Ltd. via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Laser cladding robots in 2026

The newest results are about wear surfaces that face both heat and corrosion. In September 2026 Australia's CSIRO showed a prototype brake disc with a 3 to 4 mm laser-clad layer of stainless steel mixed with boron carbide. CSIRO made the composite powder in its Powder Lab, Romar Engineering did the cladding, and Meisterform of Singapore designed the 355 mm disc. CSIRO says the clad layer has more than double the microhardness and tensile strength of the plain SS410L steel underneath. Coated discs matter because the EU's Euro 7 rules now cover brake dust.

Laser cladding a hard layer onto a valve part, with sparks of powder around the nozzle. Photo: Firstcomer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Speed is changing what cladding is used for. Extreme high-speed laser material deposition, or EHLA, developed by Fraunhofer ILT and RWTH Aachen University, melts the powder before it reaches the surface and runs up to around 500 m per minute, against 0.5 to 2 m per minute for conventional cladding. It does without the chromium(VI) used in hard chrome plating. IHC Vremac Cylinders was the first company to coat hydraulic cylinders with it. On railways, researchers are testing laser cladding to repair EA4T axle steel, and track crews still build up worn crossings by hand.

An MTA worker welds a worn track crossing frog by hand near Coney Island, New York, 2012. Photo: Leonard Wiggins, Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Most cladding robots are standard six-axis industrial arms with a cladding head, a powder feeder and a laser source. ABB arms are among those used. The Basque Digital Innovation Hub in Spain, for example, lists a laser metal cladding cell built on an ABB robot with two work tables, one of them a two-axis positioner, for repair, coatings and new geometry, plus a plasma metal cladding cell on an ABB IRB 1600. A positioner turns a shaft under the head while the robot moves along it, which ABB's controllers handle as external axes synchronised with the arm.

An ABB arc welding robot with a positioner that turns heavy parts, the setup cladding cells also use. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What comes next for robotic cladding and repair

The next step is repair that starts with a scan. Researchers have built robotic laser cladding cells that photograph a damaged part, find the damaged area with a deep learning model and plan the path to fill it. For factories this points to repair cells that take mixed parts from mines, mills and power plants without a programmer writing each path. Paths for odd geometry are already planned offline in RobotStudio, where an engineer can check reach and head angle on a 3D model of the worn part before the laser is switched on.

Two patches of overlapping beads laid down by robotic laser cladding in pulsed mode. Photo: Firstcomer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cladding is rarely the last step. A clad shaft or rail has to be ground or machined back to size, and robots are moving into that work too. ABB's IRB 6700 already grinds heavy steel parts in cells such as Teqram's EasyGrinder at Ancofer, and the same kind of arm could finish clad surfaces. For homes, the effect is indirect. Longer lasting brake discs, pumps and hydraulic parts mean fewer replacements, and EHLA coatings may replace chrome plating on parts people never see.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost, safety and skills. A multi-kilowatt laser, powder handling and an enclosed cell cost far more than a welding set, so cladding pays off on expensive parts first. Fine metal powder is a fire and breathing hazard, and the laser needs a closed, interlocked cell. Repaired parts in aircraft, rail and pressure equipment need qualified procedures and inspection before they go back into service. Shops also need people who understand both metallurgy and robot programming.

A large ABB robot working over battery modules in a cell at ABB's plant in Baden, Switzerland. Photo: ABB

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