Advancing Cold Spray for Additive Manufacturing: A Study on Particle Morphology, Gas Nature, and Particle Preheating

This investigation aims to understand and improve the deposition quality and rates of cold spray for additive manufacturing in a way that is economically sound and without the detrimental temperature effects seen in traditional metallic additive manufacturing processes. It focuses on materials that are desired by the additive manufacturing community and built upon the current knowledge in cold spray. This thesis is presented as a collection of published, or soon to be published, manuscripts accompanied by an introduction, literature review, and conclusion. The effect of a non-spherical particle morphology was the first objective investigated. Titanium has been shown repeatedly to require pure helium at very high temperatures and pressures to get dense coatings, however, the unique coral-like morphology resulting from the Armstrong Process was revealed as a key to successful deposition with nitrogen. Using low pressure cold spray, under conditions that would be considered mild, a deposition efficiency of 100% and a porosity of nearly 0% was achieved. This is a promising approach for cold spray as a method for additive manufacturing of titanium parts. The low powder cost and the advantages of additive manufacturing could allow for a substantial cost savings in titanium part production when compared to traditional manufacturing methods. With these cost saving advantages, additive manufacturing of titanium using Armstrong process powder and CS could lead to a paradigm shift of titanium production, allowing titanium to enter markets that under traditional methods would be far too expensive. Unfortunately, this unique powder morphology was not available in other materials. To address the low deposition efficiency of the other metals of interest, such as aluminum and stainless steel, the concept of mixing the propellant gas was introduced in the second objective. Considering the relative costs of gases, powder, electricity, and labour, the second paper focuses on the concept of optimizing the amount of helium to produce the minimum component cost. It was found that for the specific stainless steel and aluminum alloy powders discussed, costs could be reduced by 44% and 59%, respectively, using the gas mixing system. However, no cost saving was found for the most inexpensive of the powders, pure aluminum. For gas mixing to be effective, the cost of helium must be offset by the cost of the powders. Therefore, low-cost powders, such as pure aluminum, results in pure nitrogen as the least expensive option. This however doesn’t address the low deposition efficiency that is preventing its adoption in cold spray additive manufacturing. The third objective addresses just this, an improvement in deposition efficiency without the introduction of expensive helium. In this study, aluminum particles were preheated using a novel particle preheater that does not clog. This resulted in a deposition efficiency increase of 260% with a minimal increase in electrical costs. These three objectives, while studied and published separately, all relate to the purpose of this work to improve the process economics without detrimental temperature effects. These findings have been (or will be) published in international peer reviewed journals to add to the collective knowledge.

Grantor dc:publisher

Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• MacDonald, Daniel Alexander

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jodoin, Bertrand

• coldspray
• cold spray
• additive manufacturing
• 3d Printing
• particle morphology
• gas mixing
• particle preheating
• metals

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-28704

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/44498