Recent Research Advances in Plasma Spraying of Bulk-Like Dense Metal Coatings with Metallurgically Bonded Lamellae

Although thermal spray metallic coatings have been widely used for materials protection from wear, corrosion and oxidation, its porous feature limits the full utilization of materials potential. Moreover, the oxidation inherent to thermal spraying in the ambient atmosphere is detrimental to interlamellar bonding formation, which further degrades the performance of thermal spray metal coatings. How to tape out the full potential of spray materials in the form of the coating is a still great challenge to thermal spray coating technology. Facing such challenge, recent efforts have been made to deposit dense metallic coatings with sufficiently bonded lamellae by oxide-free molten droplets through atmospheric plasma spraying. In this paper, the strategies for depositing bulk-like metal coatings will be reviewed. The formation of the bulk-like coating through post-spray treatments is briefly reviewed including post-spray heat treatment and laser remelting following the brief introduction to the features of thermal spray metallic coatings. The effect of the substrate preheating temperature on the splat formation and subsequently the adhesion formation was examined to reveal the dominant limitation of resultant oxide scale. Then, the role of the deposition temperature on the formation of bulk-like metal deposits with neglecting the effect of oxidation during spraying by vacuum plasma spraying practices is shortly presented. The recent progress on the new strategies to develop spread-fusing bonding mechanism and in-situ in-flight deoxidizing mechanism through developing ultra-hot metallic droplets will be introduced. The thermodynamics and kinetics requirements for the in-situ in-flight deoxidizing through deoxidizer elements adding to alloy spray powders for achieving oxide-free molten droplets in the ambient atmosphere are examined. The conditions to develop the spread-fusing mechanism during the spreading of impacting molten metal droplet for metallurgical bonding are presented. It is obvious from this review paper that the realization of two mechanisms depends on both the spray materials design and heating control of in-flight particles. Through the generation of ultra-hot droplets by plasma spraying to achieve oxide-free molten droplets, strategically it will be possible to deposit bulk-like dense metallic coating through spread-fusing of splat surfaces with limited post-spray oxidation. Such strategies will tape out the full potential of coating materials and open up the new application fields for plasma spraying.