Composite coatings manufactured by cold spray

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Tribology and surface engineering are disciplines that seek to enhance the properties of materials for applications where friction and wear resistance are important. These are fundamental engineering design concerns that, when addressed, can increase the lifetime of components for industrial systems, and reduce energy consumption through proper mitigation of frictional forces. Placing a coating on the surface of a material is a very common strategy to enhance wear resistance and control friction. What industry needs from surface engineers and tribologists are well characterized coatings made by processes with the potential for making 'drop-in' replacements and repair technologies. This is important to maintain a supply chain of cost effective and well performing surface engineering options. This proposal seeks to further develop the coating technology known as cold spray such that composite coatings can be fabricated that have either wear resistant or self lubricating properties. Currently, cold spray is most used for pure metallic coatings, due the nature of the process where materials must be deformable to be effectively sprayed. Our project will combine metallic and non-metallic powders through a new independent, co-feeding of the powders to the cold spray 'gun.' This will overcome difficulties other researchers have encountered with pre-mixing of powders. With this new technique, we will investigate two important coating systems, one for resistance to erosive wear and the other for self lubrication of metallic systems. Both coating systems will be well characterized and developed to the point where industry can consider them for surface engineering applications. Alongside the fabrication of new composite coatings with cold spray, experimental data on the materials sprayed here will be combined with computational models to simulate the cold spray process. The outcome will be a processing window tool that will help to predict optimal spray conditions for any two powder systems. As such, we will be well prepared at the end of the project to continue research on composite coatings made by cold spray for other applications in Canadian industries, such as aerospace, automotive, pipeline, forestry and mining.