COLD SPRAY STUDY BY MOLECULAR DYNAMICS
Cold Spray (CS) is a surface coating technique commonly used to repair metal parts. It has been used for this purpose over the past two decades. More recently, it has also been used for additive manufacturing of complete metal parts. The technique consists in propelling powder particles, usually metallic, still in the solid phase against a substrate using a gas.
CS has been extensively studied experimentally and also through computational modeling, mainly by finite elements. Recently, the need to understand the mechanisms at the atomic level relating to the severe deformation experienced by the particle during impact and its adhesion to the substrate have caused several researchers to invest in the use of molecular dynamics.
In this work, we proposed a model at the atomistic level to investigate the role of the fragile shell involving a metallic (ductile) particle in the particle's adhesion process. This model is a simplification of the metal oxide layer that typically surrounds the metallic particles used in Cold Spray.