Particle Acceleration in a High Enthalpy Nozzle Flow with a Modified Detonation Gun

Abstract

The quality of thermal sprayed coatings depends on many factors which have been investigated and are still in scientific focus. Mostly, the coating material is inserted into the spray device as solid powder. The particle condition during the spray process has a strong effect on coating quality. In some cases, higher particle impact energy leads to improved coating quality. Therefore, a computer-controlled detonation gun based spraying device has been designed and tested to obtain particle velocities over 1200 m/s. The device is able to be operated in two modes based on different flow-physical principles. In one mode, the device functions like a conventional detonation gun in which the powder is accelerated in a blast wave. In the other mode, an extension with a nozzle transforms the detonation gun process into an intermittent shock tunnel process in which the particles are accelerated in a high enthalpy nozzle flow with high reservoir conditions. Presented are experimental results of the operation with nozzle in which the device generates very high particle velocities up to a frequency of 5 Hz. A variable particle injection system allows injection of the powder at any point along the nozzle axis to control particle temperature and velocity. A hydrogen/oxygen mixture is used in the experiments. Operation performance and nozzle outflow are characterized by time resolved pressure measurements. The particle conditions inside the nozzle and in the nozzle exit plane are calculated with a quasi-one-dimensional WENO-code of high order. For the experiments, particle velocity is obtained by particle image velocimetry, and particle concentration is qualitatively determined by a laser extinction method. The powders used are WC-Co(88/12), NiCr(80/20), Al2O3, and Cu. Different substrate/powder combinations for varying particle injection positions have been investigated by light microscopy and measurements of microhardness.