Nanosecond Laser Surface Treatment Of Steels. Different Applications In The Fields Of Corrosion, Nuclear Industry And Decontamination

International audienceAmong the numerous laser applications, laser surface melting by using a pulsed-laser is an innovative technology in the field of surface treatments. This technique presents many advantages. It only modifies the surface properties by keeping the mechanical properties of the bulk. It requires neither addition of other compounds nor contact, so it is quite economical and it does not pollute the material. It allows the treatment of complex shapes into closed spaces with difficult access. The laser can work in autonomy that present an interest in the fields of nuclear decontamination.This treatment consists in focusing a nanopulsed laser beam on the surface of the material, leading to the rather immediate melting of the surface through a micron depth, immediately followed by an ultra-fast solidification occurring with cooling rate up to 1010 K/s.By using different techniques of analysis, we showed that the combination of these processes leads to various modifications of surface properties. Glow discharge optical emission spectrometry (GDOES) and transmission electronic microscopy (TEM) were used to establish the segregation of chemical elements and the growth of a new oxide layer with new properties.X-Ray diffraction (XRD) with grazing incidence was employed to identify the change of crystallographic structure, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was performed to promote the diminution of the surface defects and the roughness was also characterized.Applications in fields of nuclear, corrosion, and decontamination will be presented. Those results showed that the new surface properties strongly depend of the laser parameters