Since the 1980s, laser cladding technology has been applied in heavy industries such as aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding, and machinery. In 1981, Rolls-Royce of the UK clad cobalt-based alloys on engine turbine blades, significantly improving their wear resistance. Fiat of Italy used Stellite alloy as the cladding material to strengthen the surface of automotive engine exhaust valve seats.
In 2013, the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed and developed China's first semiconductor laser for cladding. High-speed laser cladding technology was proposed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology in Germany in 2017, and in 2019, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China identified high-speed laser cladding as one of the technologies to replace electroplating. In the same year, China's first domestically developed high-speed laser cladding system was unveiled. According to statistics, the market size of laser cladding equipment in China had grown to 11.5 billion yuan in 2020, with particularly strong demand in downstream applications such as new energy vehicles and aerospace.
In October 2023, Chongqing News Network reported on the achievements of additive manufacturing technology. This technology can create special coatings to give industrial parts better rigidity or toughness, and has been widely used in automotive engineering, equipment manufacturing, aerospace, rail transportation, biomedicine, and other fields.
In 2024, Haoqi Technology proposed a new method for preparing surface-strengthening coatings that combines biomimetic surface microtexturing with laser cladding technology, significantly improving the bonding strength between the substrate and the coating.