INDUSTRY:
Academic
WORK:
Powder Handling, Mechanical Design
Metal Powder Feeder
about.
This capstone project was created to support the research of cold spray additive manufacturing in one of the labs. Cold spray additive manufacturing shoots supersonic metal powders at a target and relies on its kinetic energy to fuse to the target. This, rather uniquely, necessitates dispensing constantly varying quantities of powder into a supersonic jet stream in order to control the material deposition process.
challenge.
Existing solutions have experimentally, been highly variable at different hopper load levels due to material caking. Disk based solutions have an inability to dispense material smoothly as the holes at the core of their function are, by definition, discrete. While this can theoretically be solved with software by syncing disc rotations with the spray head control, the disks are subject to high amounts of wear that can cause them to dispense varying amounts of material.
result.
A high level overview of the full project including final results charts can be found here.
The centrifugal method I developed was effective in stopping the flow of powder and restarting the flow of powder even without tuning for particular materials characteristics. This is promising as it eliminates all wear components and can enable practical CSAM applications with fine ceramic powders that have previously proven to be too abrasive for the disk feeding method.
Further improvements can be made by optimizing the funnel geometry for different materials and their particular bulk handling characteristics as the final testing showed the powder diameter and RPM were both major contributors to the feed rate observed.
