Abstract
The temperature of a substrate during thermal spraying may have a significant influence on the quality of coatings, especially for low-temperature materials such as polymers. The temperature must be high enough to thermally activate the interfacial bonding mechanisms but low enough to avoid degradation of the coating material or the substrate surface. It is thus necessary to understand and control the processes governing the temperature of the coating and substrate. However, thermal-spray deposition is a complex, dynamic process and the temperature distribution across the surface and through the thickness of the coating and substrate depends on many parameters. The scanning characteristics, the nature of the spray technique and the substrate dimensions are known qualitatively to influence the temperature profiles but the quantified inter-relationships are inadequately understood. It is difficult to characterize by experimental measurements the shifting patterns of temperature within the substrate because of the innumerable combinations of operating parameters. A computational model is therefore developed in this paper to simulate the temperature patterns during the deposition process. The influence of operating conditions, the spray technique and the dimensions of the substrate are taken into account in the computational model.
