Application of In Situ Observation Techniques for Understanding the Principles of the Cold Spray Coating Formation

Abstract

As it has been demonstrated that the use of the observation equipment applied on the spray process helps to gain a better coating in terms of properties, non-intrusive observation equipment (Control Vision Inc's SprayCam) is used in the current work for the observations of the jet and particles during the spray process. The application of such in-situ observation techniques concerns the field of cold spraying and brings new insights into the formation process of cold sprayed coatings. The build-up of coatings operated with different parameters (copper powder, nozzle, etc.) are recorded with an extreme short unit of time and then analyzed with the help of digital techniques such as image processing. The basic theories on cold spraying were previously verified by simulation and then compared to experimental results considering the distribution of flying particles involving in the build-up of the coating. The accumulation of data collected by in situ processing techniques during the spray allows understanding the complete steps of the coating formation consequently could bring the entire cold spraying mechanism to a higher level of research.