Characterization of Cold-Sprayed Copper Coatings and comparison with Wrought Copper using Miniaturized Shear Punch Tests (SPT)

Abstract

Mechanical properties of a material always play a key role in identifying its application. The mechanical properties of metals determine the range of usefulness of a material and establish the service life that can be expected. Stronger the material; more likely it is to be used in a heavy-duty environment. Mechanical properties are also used to help classify and identify material.The common properties evaluated are strength, ductility, hardness, impact resistance, and fracture toughness. There are various tools available today to evaluate the mechanical properties of a material; typically; Tensile strength using the UTM; hardness using Vickers, Rockwell etc. hardness tester, Electrical conductivity of metals using C-AFM / eddy current conductivity method etc. Thermal spray is one of the emerging industries in the field of additive manufacturing. Variation in properties are most likely to occur in Additive-manufacturing parts. It is thus necessary to establish a quality control. At the same time this quality control method should be economical (low experimental cost; minimum material wastage), time-saving. The study aims to establish a correlation between the tensile strength and shear strength of Cold-sprayed (Thermal spray) Cu using miniaturized SPT. Cold sprayed samples were manufactured in collaboration with Spee3D (an Australian based company) [3]. An attempt has been made to establish SPT as a quality control tool for materials with limited availability. Wrought copper C11000 (H-4 temper) has been used as a baseline for comparison. Characterization using SEM and other mechanical properties viz, Hardness and electrical conductivity are measured.