Gas Flow, Particle Acceleration, and Heat Transfer in Cold Spray: A review

Cold spraying is increasingly attracting attentions from both scientific and industrial communities due to its unique `low-temperature' coating build-up process and its potential applications in the additive manufacturing across a variety of industries. The existing studies mainly focused on the following subjects: particle acceleration and heating, coating build-up, coating formation mechanism, coating properties, and coating applications, among which particle acceleration and heating can be regarded as the premise of the other subjects because it directly determines whether particles have sufficient energy to deposit and form the coating. Investigations on particle acceleration and heating behavior in cold spraying have been widely conducted both numerically and experimentally over decades, where many valuable conclusions were drawn. However, existing literature on this topic is vast; a systematical summery and review work is still lack so far. Besides, some curtail issues involved in modeling and experiments are still not quite clear, which needs to be further clarified. Hence, a comprehensive summary and review of the literature are very necessary. In this paper, the gas flow, particle acceleration, and heat transfer behavior in the cold spray process are systematically reviewed. Firstly, a brief introduction is given to introduce the early analytical models for predicting the gas flow and particle velocity in cold spraying. Subsequently, special attention is directed towards the application of computational fluid dynamics technique for cold spray modeling. Finally, the experimental observations and measurements in cold spraying are summarized.