Abstract
Industrialization of cold spray brings along the questions of cost and time efficiency of various spray procedures. In this work, high rate deposition of tantalum was studied by producing coating specimens where the powder to helium mass flow rate varied from 5% to 14%. Quasi-1D fluid simulations predict a minimal effect of increased powder stream loading on particle impact velocity and temperature over those ranges, but the cost varies substantially. The experimental specimens, examined by using optical micrographs, porosity measurements, and hardness tests, show no discernable differences in the deposited samples. The increased stream loading rate, however, helped reduce the time required for processing the same amount of tantalum by a factor of three using identical helium spray conditions.
