Computer simulations of thermal spray coating processes can be used in order to speed up the development process of new products by minimizing the need for expensive prototypes. An important aim of these simulations is the calculation of the coating distribution on the surface of a given workpiece with respect to a given movement path of the spray gun.
In this paper a novel approach for computing the coating distribution on arbitrarily complex freeform surfaces is presented. It achieves a high computational efficiency by making use of the computation power of modern mainstream graphics hardware and yet allows to exchange the deposition model easily. This provides a high flexibility since the simulation may be adapted to different thermal spray processes.
The simulation is applied to the wire arc spraying process and in contrast to simulation approaches that implement symmetric deposition models, the presented concept takes a rotationally asymmetric footprint model into account. This is suitable for wire arc spraying since turbulences caused by the electrodes in the gas flow often result in asymmetric coating distributions. In order to obtain the required knowledge base to derive the deposition model and in order to verify the simulation, basic experiments were made.
The simulation concept, the experiment setup, and a comparison of the simulation results with the experimental measurements will be presented in this paper.