Laser cladding of forming tools for bipolar plates for wear protection and repair

The development of advanced coating techniques for forming tools of bipolar plates is crucial for the advancement of fuel cell production to improve service life and enable a fast and robust repair. The aim of this work is to develop a coating process and a digital process chain for protecting and repairing forming tools to enable cost reduction and scaling in fuel cell production. Different high alloyed Fe-based coating materials (e.g., tool steel M2) were tested concerning layer quality and hardness. In the context of the digitized process chain, scanning of the tool surface before and after the cladding process was investigated regarding accuracy and generation of geometry data of the surface for path planning of both cladding and post-processing.