ICME Design and Cold Spray Additive Manufacturing of FGMs with Smooth Gradients

Solvus Global, in collaboration with Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), will develop and validate an ICME design tool to enable design and fabrication of true FGMs. The ICME tool will feature concurrent modeling/design for both performance and manufacturability to ensure that FGMs with optimized performance are also manufacturable. Cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) will be employed in the project due to its multiple advantages over other AM methods for producing FGMs (details below). The program will leverage a novel CSAM system developed by Solvus, which can deposit thin layers (e.g., < 100 µm) and rapidly vary feed ratios of multiple powders simultaneously with high resolution to obtain sequential composition variation and achieve smooth gradients in both vertical and horizontal directions. Powder feedstock and CSAM process will be developed. A variety of modeling methods will be applied for FGM design, including thermodynamic stability, interlayer compatibility, property prediction (e.g., strength, CTE, etc.), and manufacturability via CSAM, complemented with a data-driven machine learning (ML) approach. Two FGM systems (Al-to-Ti and Ti-to-Ni) with optimized performance and manufacturability will be computationally designed and then fabricated using the novel cold spray system to comprise numerous thin intermediate layers to achieve smooth gradients. Microstructure characterization and property evaluation such as hardness, adhesion strength, fatigue, and corrosion will be carried out to validate the modeling predictions and demonstrate manufacturability of the FGM designs.