Numerical Modeling of Suspension and Particle Transport in Thermal Spray Processes

Fine microstructured coatings have attracted many attentions in recent years due to various unique properties such as remarkable wear resistance, enhanced catalytic behavior, and superior thermal insulation. Suspension thermal sprays have been shown to be viable techniques in generating this kind of coatings. In these techniques, suspension which is a combination of a base liquid and fine solid particles is injected into a high-temperature high-velocity jets. After suspension breakup, the evaporation/combustion of base liquid becomes dominant. Then, the remained particles are accelerated and heated up by the gas flow and are deposited on a substrate which results in the generation of dense and well-adhered coatings. Suspension thermal spraying is very complex and many fields such as turbulent flow, multiphase flow, compressible flow, combustion, atomization, suspension properties, and plasma physics are involved in the mentioned technique. In addition, many parameters and mechanisms in this technique are still unknowns. Therefore, both numerical and experimental studies should be performed to obtain a comprehensive understanding of various phenomena in suspension thermal spraying and to improve the coating quality. The main goal of this study is the numerical modeling of suspension thermal sprays. An Eulerian-Lagrangian approach with two-way coupling assumption is presented and suspension droplet evolution in the atmospheric plasma spraying and high velocity oxygen fuel spraying techniques is investigated. In this model, suspension is considered as a multi-component mixture and a predefined droplet distribution is injected into the jet. In this approach, the breakup process is simulated using Taylor Analogy Breakup (TAB), and Kelvin-Helmholtz Rayleigh-Taylor (KHRT) breakup models. After breakup process is complete, the liquid component of suspension droplet evaporates/burns, and the particles/agglomerates are tracked in the domain. In general, the effects of suspension injection velocity, suspension properties, suspension injector location, standoff distance, substrate shape, and gas properties on the coating characteristics can be investigated by this approach. For example, in the case of radial injection of suspension into a plasma plume, it is illustrated that if particles move close to the jet centerline, particle velocity and temperature as well as probability of particle impact on the substrate will increase. The mentioned Eulerian-Lagrangian approach revealed that the breakup phenomenon mainly controls the droplets/particles trajectories, temperatures and velocities. However, the typical TAB and KHRT models ignore liquid/suspension column deformation, and need experimental calibration. To study the breakup process in more details, the effect of nonuniform gaseous crossflow and liquid column perturbations on the primary breakup of liquid jets are investigated. A coupled level set and volume-of-fluid method together with the large eddy simulation turbulence model are used to study the behavior of nonturbulent liquid jets in nonuniform crossflows. It is shown that liquid penetration height is significantly affected by the crossflow nonuniformity. In addition, to investigate the effects of liquid column perturbations on the breakup process, experimental studies are performed using shadowgraphy technique. General correlations for the penetration height, the column breakup point, and the onset of surface breakup are presented. It is found that the liquid column perturbations result in formation of large ligaments very close to the liquid and gas flows interaction point. These ligaments control the droplet size distribution and have significant effects on particle in-flight behavior, and coatings quality. The results of these studies can be used to estimate the spray trajectory in suspension plasma spray process, and to improve the accuracy of TAB and KHRT breakup models.