A Concept of Aerospike Nozzle for Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing—Towards a Potential Solution for Preventing the Issue of Clogging

The clogging, a frequent gas passage deformation phenomenon because of powder accumulation on inner nozzle wall, is a major issue in long duration Cold Spray (CS) operations and a major challenge for Cold spray technology to be adopted for additive manufacturing. This study aims to design and integrate new nozzle design in Cold Spray operations for addressing the clogging issues in traditional circular convergent-divergent (CD) nozzles. The concept of the Aerospike nozzle is proposed for that purpose and is investigated using numerical simulation methods in this paper. An aerospike nozzle allows gases to accelerate externally bounded by environment on one-side and contoured spike wall on other side. After accelerating along the spike wall, aerospike nozzle can generate a longer supersonic gas stream. The spike region can be truncated near the tip to provide a flat face for powder injection. This proposed strategy will allow powder particles to accelerate through a longer supersonic core region, without interacting with nozzle wall. With appropriate operating parameters, an aerospike nozzle can reduce or eliminate the clogging issue completely. The efficiency and operation of aerospike nozzle is compared with same Mach number C-D nozzle using numerical simulations at stagnation pressure of 30 bar and temperature of 623K, where the aluminium powder particles are injected at 30 g/min in the centerline of both nozzles and are accelerated to similar velocities. The powder particles are accelerated in supersonic core region of aerospike nozzle without interacting with nozzle wall, it is concluded that the aerospike nozzle can be a promising nozzle design to provide clogging free long duration CS operations.