Large Scale Nano-Crystalline Coatings For Penetration Resistance

The Army needs an additive manufacturing (AM) ballistics resistance coating that can be applied on a large scale and within a rugged environment for repair and retrofit purposes. Current methods, which include cladding and electroplating have low deposition rates and are not readily scalable for large scale production.  The Cold Spray process has been employed in phase I of this program to develop a large scale repair and retrofit coating and process to address the above needs.  VRC Metal Systems and its subcontractors developed a dual layer ballistic resistance cold spray coating using nickel chrome-carbide (WIP-C1) and tungsten-carbide cobalt nickel (WIP-W1) pre-cursor powders. It was found that when WIP-C1 was applied directly to the substrate material, it offered good fragmentation resistance, while applying the harder WIP-W1 deposit on top of the WIP-C1, increased V50 performance. Continuing forward from these successful results, VRC and their subcontractors will take a highly engineered approach in Phase II and optimize the ballistic resistant coating to be 2-5x more effective in performance. VRC will also design and develop scalable equipment, capable of spray this hard dual layer ballistic resistant coating at large capacity, cost effectively and in a time efficient manner.