The Effect of Spray Distance and Scanning Step on the Coating Thickness Uniformity in Cold Spray Process

In the process of cold spray applications, robot kinematic parameters represent significant influences on the coating quality. Those parameters include: spray distance, spray angle, gun relative velocity to substrate, scanning step, and cycle numbers. The combined effects which are caused by their interactions determine the coating thickness. The increasing requirements of coating productivity lead to the objectivity of analyzing the effect of robot kinematic parameters. So it becomes necessary to optimize the robot trajectory for spraying process in order to obtain a desired coating thickness. This study aims at investigating the relationship between the coating profile and the spray distance, scanning step, and introducing the basic principle of a software toolkit named thermal spray toolkit (TST) developed in our laboratory to generate the optimized robot trajectories in spray processes including thermal spray and cold spray. Experiments have been carried out to check the reliability of the simulated coating profile and the calculated coating thickness by TST.