The Australian surface engineering company has been using thermal coating techniques – laser cladding – to produce hardwearing components and products for the mining, power generation, manufacturing and agriculture industries.

LaserBond chairman Allan Morton said the company’s laser-applied coatings typically tripled the life of a product.

“This is effectively 3D printing using industrial robots and industrial lasers to add material to existing substrates to create better performing products,” he said. “The economic benefit is not so much that the components are lasting longer; it’s that you don’t have to shut the system down to change components so they’re getting longer cycles out.”

Mr Morton remarked that the economic downturn was one of the reasons why there was growing interest for the company’s lasers. “When everything was going fine in our boom times, people said ‘we will not pay that because even though we might have four times the life, the price is doubled.’ But now companies are looking at costs, and the cost of downtime overwhelms any incremental cost of a higher-performing component.”

Founded in New South Wales, the company has about 65 staff and a plant in South Australia since 2013. It has recently formed a research collaboration with the University of South Australia’s Future Industries Institute and is establishing a new “laser cell” in Adelaide featuring a 16kW laser, which it hopes to have up and running in September this year.

“With these lasers, we make a 60-percent energy saving, resulting in higher efficiency and less waste. We currently have the three most powerful lasers in Australia in this industry, and the one we’re buying will be twice as big – it will be the highest power laser beam used for laser cladding in the southern hemisphere,” said Mr Morton.

LaserBond predominantly manufactures for the mining industry and exports about 80 percent of its products to countries including Chile, Mongolia and South Africa.

Products are typically made from steel and then applied with materials such as nickel alloys, tungsten, titanium carbides and ceramics.

Manufactured items include mining picks, furnace doors and “down the hole” hammers.

“Basically any new metal component that wears we can apply a surface to make it last longer; we can also make an old part with surfaces that are better than new,” Mr Morton enthused. The high power laser is used to metallurgically-bond a surfacing material to a substrate to provide high performance surfaces to new parts for extended operating life.

Mr Morton expects the new laser to allow the company to double its production. “We’re able to deposit material quicker than we currently do.”

South Australia is set to be the company’s base for research and development as well as the division for product manufacturing, according to founder and executive director Greg Hooper.