Study on CCD-based detection system for online monitoring of melt pool width in laser cladding

In order to study the size of melt pool in laser cladding, a system for monitoring the melt pool was constructed with a CCD camera and special image-processing software developed on VISUAL C++. The edge and geometric parameters of the melt pool were obtained in real-time. The width of the clad layer was obtained in time after calibration correction coefficients of the experimental detection system. Experiment results indicate that the width of melt pool can be detected accurately, and the presented system is useful for online detection of the clad quality.