Abstract
The use of cold spray in metal additive manufacturing (AM) offers well recognized advantages with typical commercial drivers being a rapid build rate, low process temperature, and wide range of usable alloys. Cold spray AM to date has often employed a methodology of rapid material deposition, with or without masking, into relatively simple shapes and wide tolerances that can lead to constraints in part geometries and/or significant post-spray machining. In this work, an investigation has been performed into producing more complex geometries and improving shape fidelity using a conventional AM strategy; namely, starting with a CAD drawing, slicing the CAD geometry into a layered structure, and performing a layer-by-layer build. For cold spray, technology-specific considerations must be factored into each of these steps and in particular, an effective build strategy and toolpath are critical to moving towards near-net shape parts. This requires, by extension, precise manipulation of the spray gun, or part as applicable, which was performed using industrial robot offline programming via commercially available software. Various cold spray 3d builds are used to demonstrate developments in toolpath planning and build strategy.
