Potentials of Multi-Material Additive Manufacturing with Cold Spray

A relatively new process used for Additive Manufacturing (AM) is Cold Spray, where powder particles are accelerated in a nozzle through a gas stream and plastically deformed by means of the impact on the substrate surface without melting. Originally, this technology is used for coating applications, as the particles form a dense layer. The approach of recent research is to adapt this technology for AM of near net shape parts and multi-material parts. This application leads to additional requirements on the Cold Spray process planning. In this paper, the challenges and potentials of AM applications are identified. The focus will be on multi-material AM applications, which differ due to the higher complexity, in e.g. the amount of layers and the trajectory planning, from coating applications.