Currently, there are two main issues regarding the development of core technologies in the automotive industry: the development of environmentally friendly vehicles and securing a high level of safety in the event of an accident. As part of the efforts to address these issues, research into alternative materials and new car body manufacturing and assembly technologies is necessary, and this has been carried out mainly by the automotive industries. Large press molds for producing car body parts are made of cast iron. With the increase of automobile production and various changes of design, the press forming process of car body parts has become more difficult. In the case of large press molds, high hardness and abrasive resistance are needed. To overcome these problems, we attempted to develop a combined heat treatment process consisting of local laser heat treatment followed by plasma nitriding, and evaluated the characteristics of the proposed heat treatment method. From the results of the experiments, it has been shown that the maximum surface hardness is 864 Hv by the laser heat treatment, 953 Hv by the plasma nitriding, and 1,094 Hv by the combined heat treatment. It is anticipated that the suggested combined heat treatment can be used to evaluate the durability of press mold.

Recently, metal molding has become essential not only for automobile parts, but also mass production, and has greatly influenced production costs as well as the quality of products. Its surface has been treated by carburizing, nitriding and induction hardening, but these existing treatments cause considerable deformation and increase the expense of postprocessing after treatment; furthermore, these treatments cannot be easily applied to parts that requiring the hardening of only a certain section. This is because the treatment cannot heat the material homogeneously, nor can it heat all of it. Laser surface treatment was developed to overcome these disadvantages, and, when the laser beam is irradiated on the surface and laser speed is appropriate, the laser focal position is rapidly heated and the thermal energy of surface penetrates the material after irradiation, finally imbuing it with a new mechanical characteristic by the process of self-quenching. This research estimates the material characteristic after efficient and functional surface treatment using HPDL, which is more efficient than the existing CW Nd:YAG laser heat source. To estimate this, microstructural changes and hardness characteristics of three parts (the surface treatment part, heat affect zone, and parental material) are observed with the change of laser beam speed and surface temperature. Moreover, the depth of the hardened area is observed with the change of the laser beam speed and temperature.