Study of metallic particle bonding on thermoplastic substrate in cold spray

The aim of the present work is the development and comparative analysis of numerical models implemented in ABAQUS/Explicit for the simulation of the Cold Spray process on polymeric substrates, concerning the deposition of aluminum powders on Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK) substrate. The numerical models developed consider the case of a single spherical particle of aluminum impacting onto the surface of a flat substrate. Since the deposition process depends not only on the process parameters but also on the properties of the particle material and the substrate, particular attention was paid to the modeling of the elastic and plastic behavior of aluminum and PEEK. The numerical approaches presented - Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE), Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), and Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) - are proposed as alternatives to the Lagrangian approach, to overcome the critical issues related to excessive mesh distortion, which occur in the case of high deformations and are the potential cause of simulation failure. The simulation results are compared with experiments reported in the literature to evaluate the effectiveness of the different methods. The CEL method, despite having a higher computational cost, shows a good compromise between accuracy in the description of the key phenomena involved in the deposition mechanism (in particular the mechanical interlocking between particle and substrate) and robustness concerning high deformation conditions.