Cold Spraying of 3D Parts – Challenges

Abstract

Cold spray (CS) is a solid-state coating process that has recently been explored as an additive manufacturing (AM) process to fabricate bulk components. Nowadays, new advances in cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) call for new process implementation to improve the manufacturing accuracy and flexibility. CSAM is attracting more and more attention in becoming an efficient and effective 3D AM process. This chapter addresses suitable strategies for manufacturing a bulk component with geometrical accuracy by implementing robotized cold spraying processes with various suitable tools. New modules such as inter-process module can be integrated to bring more possibilities for the conventional CS process. It is revealed that system modularity is suitable to revolutionize the CSAM method. Combination of robot trajectory, processing parameters and three-dimensional geometric model of the coating profile based on Gaussian distribution have been developed for a better control of the additive process. Results of both numerical and experimental verifications show that such an approach has a good prediction accuracy. Against the volume-forming strategy using a tessellation method, it enables a better 3D near-net shape forming based on a stable building of layers using the parameters of cold spraying. This strategy makes the CS method a viable additive process for a 3D bulk direct forming.