Titanium alloys exhibit high specific strength characteristics. They are for this reason widely used by aeronautical engineers mostly to design airframes and gas turbine components. Very often, surface treatments are applied to locally increase the surface properties, especially to obtain a better resistance against wear. Thermal spraying is largely used to manufacture these coatings. This technology requires a specific surface preparation prior to the spraying stage. This surface preparation conventionally consists in surface degreasing and grit-blasting which has some drawbacks, among them a significant decrease of the components fatigue resistance due to the notch-sensitive behavior of these alloys. The PROTAL process consists in combining surface cleaning based on laser ablation to the deposition stage thus avoiding grit-blasting. This paper aims to present an overview of the possibilities offered by this process for the coating of titanium alloys; the criticality of the different processing parameters is studied and discussed.

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