Cold spray multi-material additive manufacturing for electric motors

Cold spray (CS) is a solid-state technology seen as an emerging additive manufacturing (AM) process as it allows the production of several centimeters thick deposits from a variety of materials. CS deposition can be planned, using advanced toolpath programming, to realize freestanding parts or to build complex features on existing components. As CS is a deposition technology, multi-material parts can be fabricated without assembly. In comparison to other AM techniques, CS presents several advantages such as very high buildup rates and very good mechanical integrity and is not limited in term of part size. Due to the absence of melting of the deposited material and its low thermal impact, CS is a very interesting technique for the processing of temperature sensitive composites, for the deposition of materials with very different melting points and for the realization of multi-material and graded structures.

This talk will highlight the capabilities of cold spray for multi-material processing by presenting a case study related to the fabrication of magnetic materials for electric motors. In this example, the potential of CS for the multi-material manufacturing of electric motors will be demonstrated. This technology allows the production of permanent magnets from a composite Al-NdFeB material at low temperature resulting in promising magnetic, mechanical and thermal properties. Magnets and soft magnetic materials can be shaped and combined using CS into complex structures and parts without the need for assembly. This allows the design and fabrication of new electric motor configurations leading to potentially significant cost reductions, better thermal management and improved motor performance. These new functionalities will be illustrated through the presentation of the design and fabrication of different demonstrator parts.