Investigation on the Clogging Behavior and Additional Wall Cooling for the Axial-Injection Cold Spray Nozzle

During the cold spray process, nozzle clogging always happens when spraying low-melting point materials, e.g., aluminum, significantly decreasing the working efficiency. In this paper, a comprehensive investigation was carried out to clarify the reason for inducing nozzle clogging and then to evaluate a home-made nozzle cooling device for preventing nozzle clogging. Computational fluid dynamics technique was employed as the main method with some necessary experiment validation. It is found that the particle dispersion and the high-temperature nozzle wall at the near-throat region are two dominant factors that cause nozzle clogging. The numerical results also reveal that the home-made cooling device can significantly reduce the nozzle wall temperature, which was validated by the experimental measurement. Besides, the aluminum coating build-up experiment further indicates that the additional cooling device can truly prevent the nozzle clogging.