| Abstract | Cold spray metallization of polymers is a promising surface engineering technique that enables the deposition of metal coatings onto polymer substrates at low process temperatures, resulting in improved surface properties, thus enhanced functionality of the polymeric material. However, deposition of well-adhering metallic coatings without causing surface damage to the polymer substrate is still a challenge. In this work, copper-polyamide composite coatings with different copper concentrations between 30 and 75 vol.% in the starting powders were deposited on polyamide substrates using a low-pressure cold spray system with two nozzle geometries of short and long diverging sections. The spray parameters were first developed for the deposition of polyamide powder (at gas temperature of 260 ᵒC and gas pressures ranging from 0.41 to 1.37 MPa), and then used to spray the composite powder mixtures where the polyamide particles were acting as a binder for copper particles. Inflight and impact particle characteristics (velocity and temperature) of the polyamide powder were simulated to better understand the deposition properties. Considering that the selected conditions were suboptimal for the deposition of copper particles, no surface damage was caused as no penetration of the copper particles into the polymer substrate occurred. The results show that increasing the copper content in the powder mixtures significantly improved the resulting coating uniformity and the retained copper content. In addition, the coating deposited by spraying the powder mixture with a higher copper content of 75 vol.% and using the longer nozzle yielded the highest cohesion strength. To further improve coatings cohesion, two post-spray processing methods of furnace heating and hot pressing were used, and the effect of each process on coatings properties was investigated. |
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