Battery manufacturing involves a large number of individual cells arranged in modules configured within a battery pack and connected either in series and/or parallel to deliver the required power and driving range. Cells within a module are linked using a tab-to-busbar connection as the electrical interconnect. Therefore, a battery pack contains a plurality of tab-to-busbar joints, and each must provide low electrical resistivity connection to minimize losses that may reduce the effective performance of the battery. In this work, the Dual Flow Cold Spray (DFCS) process, a modification of low-pressure cold spraying, was used to form low resistivity Cu+10%Zn and Al+10% Zn tab-to-busbar interconnects. As test coupons, 0.8 mm thick copper (Cu) was used to represent the busbar while 0.3 mm thick aluminum and nickel coated copper foils represented the respective electrode tabs. Low resistivity joint interconnects (≈100 μΩ) with high adhesion strength (≈120 MPa) have been formed. The influence of busbar surface preprocessing on the resistivity of the tab-to-busbar joints has been studied.

Recently a Ti–TiAl 3 metal–intermetallic laminate (MIL) composite attracts growing attention because they have potential application in honeycomb or sandwich components of airplanes and as biomaterial with good bio-compatibility. Of the available processing techniques, diffusion bonding of elemental titanium and aluminum foils is an effective low-temperature method to synthesize the composite, allowing growth of the intermetallic layer. However, application of assembling and multi-pass cold rolling operations leads to fact that this technology is complex and expensive. The use of Cold Spray technology instead of aluminum foils utilization and multi-pass cold rolling to produce the Ti–TiAl 3 MIL composites is believed to be more effective. However, reaction diffusion kinetics of Ti-Al particulate composite differs from that of classical MIL composite and needs to be studied. The task of this paper is to define microstructural changes of Tl-TiAl 3 composite coating during cold spraying and reaction sintering. The optical microscopy, SEM, EDS, X-ray and microhardness examinations are presented and discussed.