In recent years, the metallization of polymers has been intensely studied as it takes advantage of both plastics and metals. Laser direct writing (LDW) is one of the most widely used technologies to obtain metal patterns on polymer substrates. In LDW technology, different methods including injection-molding, drop-casting, dip coating, and spin coating are utilized for surface preparation of polymer materials prior to the laser activation process. In this study, an atomization based dual regime spray coating system is introduced as a novel method to prepare the surface of the materials for LDW of metal patterns. Copper micropatterns on the polymer surface were achieved with a minimum feature size of 30 μm, having a strong adhesion and excellent conductivity. The results show that the dual regime spray deposition system can be potentially used to obtain uniform thin film coating with relatively less material consumption on the substrates for surface preparation of laser direct metallization of polymers.
Cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) is an emerging technique for scalable and rapid deposition of thick metallic coatings on various substrates. Despite great promises, CSAM with no upper limit of coating thickness remains challenging due to the stochastic nature of cold spray (CS) deposition. In particular, using axisymmetric nozzles (i.e., circular supersonic nozzles) lead to a quasi-Gaussian shaped particle distribution on the target surface, which limits the CSAM due to the formation of triangular-shaped (i.e., peak/valley-shaped) coating morphology. Recently, rectangular cold spray nozzles have been applied to CS particle deposition, and found to be promising for CSAM owing to its more uniform particle distribution and wider spray beam. In these studies, however, process-structure properties of cold spray deposition with a rectangular nozzle have not been sufficiently elucidated. Practical expansion of rectangular nozzles in CSAM strictly depends on uncovering process-structure properties of CS deposition phenomenon. To this end, we investigate cold spray deposition of microscale particles using a rectangular nozzle through three-dimensional discrete-phase turbulent flow modeling. The numerical modeling results are experimentally justified using a dual disc anemometer setup. The influence of operating gas conditions on critical particle deposition parameters is studied. An experimental case study of cold spray particle deposition on a polymer (ABS) substrate is also conducted to show the potential of rectangular nozzle in cold-spray based polymer metallization. The results suggest that cold spraying using a rectangular nozzle is beneficial for a more uniform, compact, and higher precision particle distribution on the target surface.
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