Today most products made out of shape memory alloys for the medical and the actuator market are processed along the route melting, forging, rolling and/or drawing. The process of cold gas deposition would open the door to a very effective way to produce near net-shape products on one side but also the possibility to create surfaces with shape memory or superelastic behaviour.

The advantage of the principle of cold gas deposition in comparison to the traditional melting path is the fact, that after a deposition and a heat treatment the product will have shape memory or superelastic behaviour, wheras the cast structure of the melt requires several steps of thermomechanical treatments to get the shape memory or superelastic properties.

Conventional electrochemical deposition methods can not not be used for NiTi because of the electrochemical potential and the reaction with Oxygen. The stoichiometric depostion out of aprotic solutions was not yet sucessful. Using sputter technologies is mainly aneconomic problem in case of bigger coatings. Coatings which are deposited by metal spraying technologies do not have shape memory properties due to their casting structure. With a modified coldgas deposition process highly cold formed layers can be processed. After a heat treatment those layers show shape memory behaviour.

This paper will show the first results of cold deposited shape memory parts, the mechanical properties, the effect size, the porosity and the corrosion behaviour