Modeling Aspects of High Velocity Impact of Particles in Cold Spraying by Explicit Finite Element Analysis

Cold spraying is a new coating technology on the basis of aerodynamics and high-speed impact dynamics. It has been widely investigated by both numerical and experimental methods owing to its advantages over the conventional thermal spraying processes to deposit a wide variety of metals, alloys and composites. However, there are still some important aspects to be well revealed including the actual bonding mechanism of spray particles. A few studies focused on the impacting and deformation behaviors of spray particles by both experiments and simulations. Because of the very short duration of particle impact, the numerical method takes an important role in studying the particle deformation process.

In this study, a systematic examination of cold spay particle impacting behavior using the ABAQUS/Explicit program was conducted for different materials, such as commonly used pure metals and alloys. Various combinations of calculation settings concerning element type, ALE adaptive meshing, contact interaction, material damage, etc. were examined with the main focus on the element excessive distortion and its effect on the resultant output. The effects of meshing size and particle size on the impact behavior were also clarified compared to the previous results obtained using the LS-DYNA code. Some fundamental aspects on modeling of cold spray particle deformation were further discussed.