Patent ID: 7043330

Claim:
A system for producing a cladding on a substrate, comprising: a) a laser for processing materials and focusing means for directing and focusing a laser light beam from said laser onto a substrate surface, a substrate holder and positioning means for adjusting the position of the laser light beam and the substrate with respect to each other, and powder injection means for injecting powder onto said substrate surface; b) image detection means for capturing images of an interaction region between said laser light beam and powder injected onto said substrate surface; and c) a computer control means connected to said laser, said positioning means and said powder injection means, wherein said computer control means includes modeling means to model cladding growth by laser processing of powder and extract from said model desired values for the pre-selected properties of the growing clad in real-time, and said computer control means including image processing means for processing images of the interaction region between said laser light beam and the powder injected onto said substrate surface and extracting from said images values of pre-selected properties of a growing clad in real-time, said computer control means including processing means to compare said extracted values of said pre-selected properties of the growing clad in real-time to desired values of said pre-selected properties of the growing clad produced by the model of cladding growth by laser processing of powder, and wherein said image processing means includes pattern recognition processing means to extract the pre-selected properties of a growing clad in real-time from images captured by the image detection means, said computer control means including intelligent process controller means interfaced to said laser, said intelligent process controller being a fuzzy logic controller including fuzzy logic membership functions, an inference engine and a defuzzification module, wherein said fuzzy logic membership functions are utilized to fuzzify the difference between first input signals, which are said extracted values of the pre-selected properties of the growing clad in real-time extracted by said pattern recognition processing means, and second input signals which are the desired values of the pre-selected properties of the growing clad, and wherein the inference engine combines the fuzzified difference between said first and second input signals, and wherein the defuzzification module defuzzifies outputs of the inference engine to convert them back into quantitative values, said quantitative values being output from the intelligent process controller means and used to adjust parameters of said laser light beam, the positioning means and said powder injection means to give the desired values of the pre-selected properties of the clad.