Regular Article

Cold sprayed copper coating: numerical study of particle impact and coating characterization^*

Centre de Développement des Technologies Avancées, Cité 20 août 1956, BP 17 Baba Hassen, Alger, Algeria

^a e-mail: ymebdoua@cdta.dz

Received: 23 June 2015
Revised: 1 July 2015
Accepted: 26 November 2015
Published online: 3 May 2016

Abstract

Cold spraying technique is a promising process fabricating high quality metallic coatings. This work concerns both numerical and experimental investigations of cold sprayed copper coating taking into account impact conditions including, particle velocities and temperature, gas pressure and material nature. The conducted numerical study is an examination of the deformation behavior of Cu particles sprayed onto steel substrate using Abaqus/explicit software, allowing a good understanding of the deposition characteristics of copper particles and the effect of particle velocity on the coating microstructure. The numerical results show that particle impact velocity has a significant effect on its morphology; Lagrangian method exhibits an excessive distortion of the elements in the case of high impact velocity and fine meshing size, whereas simulation of particle impact using arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method is close to the experimental observations.