WP1 R&D Mobility Fund | Cold Spray is Go!

If you’ve been following the BrightSky project for a while, you probably remember the exciting potential of cold spray, a technology that allows us to add material to an existing component, without detrimental effects on the original material. As we started researching how to apply this technology for the repair of aircraft components, we quickly realized the need for our own cold spray equipment, to get real hands-on experience, and to make our own test specimens and prototype repairs.

Thanks to a collaboration with the CSAR project (funded by the NWO’s Open Technology Programme), BrightSky partners EPCOR and TU Delft jointly purchased a Titomic D623 medium pressure cold spray system, which was installed at SAM XL. With this system, operators can build up experience, and the Cold Spray Team (EPCOR, KLM E&M, HvA, NLR, TU Delft) will explore the performance of cold spray repairs. With this knowledge we can understand which repair cases are suited to cold spray, and how to get the best results.

The cold spray system was officially inaugurated during an opening ceremony on September 16th. During the event, Peter van der Veldt (EPCOR) and John-Alan Pascoe (TU Delft) highlighted the possibilities this system gives for collaboration between industry and academia, both within and beyond the BrightSky project.

Figure 1: Live demo of the cold spray system during the opening event.

With the system now fully operational, activities are underway to build up our experience with the system. The first step will be a series of trials to find the optimal spray parameters for repairs on an aerospace grade aluminium alloy, which will teach us the effect of different process parameters on the quality of a repair. In parallel, we will start experimenting with how to best deposit material on real aircraft components which have been removed from service. In conjunction with this, we will continue developing our acoustic process monitoring system.

Last year, we conducted a proof of concept of this system at the facilities of Titomic Europe (https://brightsky.nl/2023/09/21/wp1-first-cold-spray-monitoring-trials/). The first results are very promising, as you can read in this paper: https://rdcu.be/d0hyS. Now, an upgraded version of the acoustic monitoring system has been installed on our cold spray machine, making it much easier to gather the data needed to train the analysis algorithms.

All in all, there are exciting times ahead for the Cold Spray Team and we look forward to sharing what we learn as we start using our system in earnest. So, keep following the BrightSky project to stay up to date!

Figure 2: First batch of specimens for the cold spray trials