Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Cold Sprayed Amorphous Coating

Metallic glasses, especially those based on zirconium have garnered significant attention due to their unique amorphous structure, offering a combination of high strength, corrosion resistance, and unique wear properties. The cold spray process, a solid-state coating deposition method, has emerged as a promising technique for applying metallic glass coatings, preserving the amorphous structure. The presented studies aimed to analyze the microstructure and mechanical properties of a cold sprayed Zr- based amorphous powder. The coating was sprayed using the Impact Innovations 5/8 system with the robot Fanuc M-20iA at Kielce University of Technology. The feedstock used for this study was commercial AMZ-4 powder. The high kinetic energy of feedstock particles and their morphology caused significant deformation, and particular splats strongly adhered to the substrate and each other. Throughout the cross-section, the coating was homogenous and exhibited negligible porosity. On the other hand, histograms and probability distributions of the hardness and Young's modulus of cold sprayed coating showed significant differences. X-ray diffraction analysis indicated that the deposited coating had the same amorphous structure as the feedstock.