Abstract
All companies involved in aviation industry face severe global competition. Thereby in particular maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) companies deal with difficult challenges for a modern production. Already today a clear trend for high flexibility, reduced process times and costs is visible. To face these challenges different options for thermal spraying processes will be presented. Thereby modern gun technologies and system concepts can achieve an up to 70% reduced total process time. However, by only optimizing hardware the needs of a modern production could not be fulfilled. Also established standards like quality management or development structures need to be adapted. For example the mostly used sample based quality management shows several disadvantages like time-delayed failure detection and a high rework rate. Here a well balanced concept based on the three pillars: particle monitoring, parameter monitoring and a reduced sample based quality management could achieve an efficient quality management with rework rates below 4%. Finally the positive aspects of modern Design of Experiment (DoE) strategies for coating development are presented. By using DoE times and efforts for developing could be reduced by 60%. A model based target value optimization could even enable a calculation of process parameters.
