from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Cold spray (CS) is a promising technology for the restoration of worn parts manufactured from numerous materials. The most important benefits are the preclusion of phase transformation caused by bonding by plastic deformation at low temperatures, providing oxide-free coatings with internal compressive residual stresses. The deposition of Ni-superalloys, namely Inconel, is a challenging task due to the insufficient acceleration of powder particles while using nitrogen as a processing gas. This leads to a low deposition efficiency (DE) and the formation of rather low-quality coatings. This study presents the first results of the restoration of artificial defects fabricated on a real turbine blade manufactured from Inconel 713LC (substrate) and the influence of the substrate preheating. This work aims to validate the Inconel 713LC as a material suitable for cold spraying. The powder particles, substrate, and coatings were characterized by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The powder particle size varied from 22 to 53 µm. The X-ray diffraction was performed to assess the phase composition and the hardness measurement for comparison of the powder particles and the coating hardness. Metallographic analysis was conducted to study the interface between coating and artificial defects and to evaluate the restoration capability of cold sprayed Inconel 713LC. The Inconel 713LC coating was successfully deposited onto the real turbine blade with artificial defects. The geometry of defects has a significant influence on the quality of the coating. Phase transformations studied by means of X-ray diffraction were not detected.
Keywords: Cold Spray, Inconel, repair, artificial defects© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.