TITLE: The Slurry Erosion Behaviour of the Cold Sprayed Nickel Chromium Coatings.

INTRODUCTION Cold sprayed coatings are used to improve the wear characteristics of surfaces since they combine several attractive features, i.e. resistance to abrasion, erosion, high temperature and corrosive atmospheres. The cold spray is a method for coating substrates under atmospheric conditions. In this process micron sized solid particles are accelerated and transported to substrates by means of supersonic free jets. Upon impacting the substrates, particles stick to the surface and form coatings which possess very low porosity.The cold spray method is related to classical thermal spray methods but it has some interesting additional features. The cold spray process is still primarily in the research and development stage and only now becoming commercially available, and has been accepted as a new and novel thermal spray technique mainly in developed countries. The technology has great potential for future research especially with reference to its application to real industrial solution. A typical cold spray system consists of a compressor or a high pressure gas delivery system, a gas heater, a powder hopper, a control console, and cold spray gun. The gas delivery system supplies up to 60 SCFM of nitrogen and/or helium at the pressure levels of 200-500 psi. An electric gas heater heats the gas to a maximum of 1200 F. Powdered coating material, in the size range of 5-45 microns, is delivered by the powder hopper and transported by a carrier gas to the gun. The control

console houses all the controls to meter the gas flow rates, pressures, powder feed rate, etc. Cold spray gun is the heart of the system. It is a precision engineered device, which converts the mechanical energy of the gas jet into kinetic energy of the jet and transfers a part of the

kinetic energy from the jet to the powder particles. The gun consists of a gun body and an easily removable/mountable nozzle assembly. The gun body may contain one or more chambers and houses all the inlet ports for the gas and powder supplies. The gas and powder jets mix in the gun body and this two phase flow goes through the converging/diverging expansion to result in a high velocity powder jet. The gun body also houses the sensors for recording the gas temperature and pressure. Cold spray coatings is a unique technology that allows fabricating dense, low oxide-content deposits of ductile materials like aluminium, stainless steel, copper, titanium and alloys, but it is limited to ductile materials only, hard and brittle materials like ceramics cannot be sprayed in the pure form, but may be applied as composites with a ductile matrix phase. Being a relatively young process considerable R&D efforts are needed to understand and control the process, as well as develop engineered coatings with desired properties for specific applications. The cold spray process is still primarily in the research and development stage and only now becoming commercially available, and has been accepted as a new and novel thermal spray technique mainly in developed countries. The technology has great potential for future research especially with reference to its application to real industrial solution. Erosion is defined as the wear caused by hard particles striking a surface, carried by a gas stream or entrained in a flowing liquid medium. Wear due to abrasion primarily depends on the surface of the material exposed to the fluid and on the properties of the particles carried with the fluid. The abrasive process on a surface is determined by the relative velocity and impact angle of the particles.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Hawthorne et al.(Ref. 28) evaluated the performance of HVOF sprayed six WC cermets with Co- or Ni-based matrices, a Cr3C2-NiCr composite and three metallic alloys coatings under both dry particle and slurry erosion conditions at 90 and 20 impingement angles. Slurry jet erosion experiments were conducted on slurry jet erosion test rig as shown in Fig 5 by using a 9 wt.% alumina/water slurry with 35 and 200 m angular alumina particles, at an impingement velocity of 15 m/s and flow rate of 181/min. Dry erosion test was performed with 50 m diameter alumina particles at a velocity of 84 m/s and feed rate of 2 g/min. The authors found that the relative resistance of most of the HVOF coatings to erosion by the large particle slurry might be directly related to their hardness for both impingement angles. A different, but still reasonably good correlation with hardness also existed for the small particle slurry erosion performance under the 90o, but not for the 20o, impingement angle. Further, they found that the relative ranking of erosion resistance of all coatings remained similar at both 90 and 20 impingement angles in slurry erosion with large particles as shown in Fig 6. In both dry erosion and slurry erosion with large particles, the WC-12Co coating showed the best performance. However, there were differences in relative ranking in slurry erosion with small particles. Here the WC- 10C0-4Cr was the best performing coating at 90 while the WC-20Cr-6Ni was best at 20. Coating composition, microstructural integrity and hardness were the major determinants of relative erosion resistance in all tests, with matrix corrosion resistance influencing the surface damage resistance of cermets in longer duration aqueous slurry tests.

Fig.5. Schematic of slurry jet erosion test rig. The effects of impingement angle and particle kinetic energy on slurry erosion of an HVOF aluminium bronze coating was investigated by Tan et al. (Ref. 29). The relationship between kinetic energy and the erosion rate for the aluminium bronze coating and AISI 1020 steel was found to as shown in Fig 7. It was found that the erosion rate of the HVOF sprayed aluminium bronze coating under 0.5 J kinetic energy was twice as high as bulk AISI 316 stainless steel but was comparable to bulk 90/10 cupro-nickel alloy. At kinetic energy of 0.1 J, the erosion rate of the coating was found to be 40 times lower than HVOF 316L and about five times higher than the HVOF tungsten carbide coating. The wear profile under 90o jet impingement showed the highest volume loss, indicating that brittle mechanisms could also influence the erosion rate. It was observed that under slurry erosion conditions, more than one mechanisms occurred concurrently on the aluminium bronze coating. Interaction between the mechanisms was suggested to be enhancing the rate of material removal. The SEM investigation of the specimen surfaces showed that combinations of plastic deformation and cutting wear contributed to the material removal. Out of the ductile wear mechanisms, micro cutting appeared to be dominant. The erosion behavior of high velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF) NiAl intermetallic compounds (IMC) coatings was examined by Hearley et al. (Ref. 30) over a range of angles and particle velocities in air at room temperature. They represented the effect of impact angle and impact velocity on erosion rate as shown in Fig 8 and Fig 9 respectively. It was observed that maximum erosion occurred at 90 for all velocities, suggesting the coating behaved in a 'brittle' manner. However morphological examination of the coatings surface suggested a ductile mechanism for coating removal. These apparently contradictory results were attributed to erodent characteristics, i.e., morphology, size and hardness. They also found that erosion rate was maximum for highest impact velocities and it can be expressed as power function of velocity. The erosion resistance of this coating was also compared to other thermally sprayed coatings. Results indicated that the HVOF NiAl IMC coating performed better than both metal and ceramic thermally sprayed coatings.

OBJECTIVES
The slurry erosion of three coatings applied by cold sprayed coating process will be studied and will be compared with the uncoated samples. This study investigates the erosion aspects of cold sprayed nickel chromium coating under sand particle impingement conditions, using a free-jet impingement erosion rig. Erodents at various kinetic energies (0.10.8_J) and impingement angles (30o and 90 ) were used to simulate actual service conditions after this the SEM analysis will also be carried out for the each samples. .