P. Fauchais, A. Vardelle, Y. Lahmar-Mebdoua, D. Gobin, University of Limoges, Limoges, France
A recent development in thermal spraying is to design the microstructure of coatings by controlling the sizes of the structural features within the coating so that they exhibit dimensions less than 100 nm. Improvements in performance can be in mechanical properties as well as functional properties. The size of these nano-structured features depend both on the nature of the starting material and the process conditions employed during production. Narrowing the crystal size distribution can be obtained from a carefully-controlled nucleation and growth process.
This study presents a one-dimensional heat transfer model of splat cooling and solidification under thermal spray conditions. The model involves melt undercooling, nucleation and crystal growth kinetics. It intends to investigate the effect of the thermal history of alumina splats deposited on steel and alumina substrates, on the size and density of the nucleated grains for a range of the following input parameters: lamella thickness, substrate material and initial temperature and, interfacial thermal contact resistance.
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