Abstract
For the application of thermally sprayed titanium coatings, the high oxygen affinity and tendency to nitride formation in the presence of nitrogen represents a major challenge. Consequently, thermally sprayed titanium coatings are usually applied by cold gas spraying, vacuum plasma spraying and shrouded spraying processes. Nevertheless, the formation of oxides cannot be completely avoided with these methods. The pre-sent study demonstrates an alternative coating strategy for the application of oxide and nitride free thermally sprayed titanium coatings. Thereby, the previous limitations are overcome by transferring the coating process into a silane-doped argon gas environment to achieve an extremely low oxygen and nitrogen partial pressure. Thus, the created titanium coatings are oxide and nitride free and have an extremely low porosity. Moreover, by transferring of the corundum blasting process to this environment, the native oxide layer on the substrate surface can be removed and its reformation is suppressed. This results in full material bonding conditions with extremely high adhesive tensile strengths.
