A general-purpose spray coating deposition software simulator

Abstract

In this work the coating thickness from a high kinetic energy spray process is predicted as a function of the gun and object kinematics. The developed simulation package is capable of handling complex parts of arbitrary geometry, in the form of triangulated surfaces. Supported features include object rotation, simultaneous 5 DOF gun movement, uniform and Gaussian radial profile of spray plume intensity, identification of triangles hidden from the plume and adaptive time-stepping methods. Advanced visualization of the results is also provided. The resulting coating thickness for each elementary triangle on the surface of an object is computed from interpolated look-up tables that contain coating parameter information such as the impact angle, stand-off distance and spot surface speed. The accuracy of the simulator is validated by comparing the predicted coating thickness with experimental measurements on equivalent and representative substrates. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.