Laser-guided discharge texturing for cold mill roller

This paper presents a new method of surface texturing for the cold mill roller called laser-guided discharge texturing to acquire the high surface roughness. In this method, the pulsed laser was focused on the roller surface to produce the metal plasma, and was then used to guide the arc discharge in the gap of electrodes to texture the roller. Laser-guided discharge texturing absorb the advantages of electrical discharge texturing and YAG laser texturing to form the following properties: the quick processing speed, the high processing energy, the deterministic distribution of the textured craters, and the enhanced surface shaping to the textured craters. In this paper, the control of the laser guiding in the randomicity of the discharge craters was studied, the surface topography of the textured craters was studied with different current peaks and pulse-widths, and the microstructures of the textured craters were analyzed.