Cold Spray

Aircraft and ground support equipment often develop surface defects and structural damage from corrosion and wear. Many traditional repair techniques apply corrosion preventative compounds that produce hazardous material waste streams without providing needed dimensional and structural restoration. As an alternative, ES3 has developed multiple low- to high-pressure Cold Spray repair systems—both robotic and handheld—that provide dimensional and structural restoration using environmentally benign, corrosion and wear resistant materials and processes.

Cold Spray is a high-energy, solid-state powder deposition process. Micro-sized metal particles are supersonically accelerated to impact a substrate. The result is a very strong, mechanically interlocking metallurgical bond between the substrate and the layers of deposited particles.

Cold spray repairs have:

exceptional adhesion > 10 ksi,
low porosity < 1%,
excellent mechanical tensile strength >60 ksi for certain powder and alloy combinations, and
a high density, high hardness, and cold-worked microstructure with compressive residual stresses that retards crack propagation and improves fatigue resistance.

ES3 has successfully advanced cold spray repair technologies under contracts with the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. These efforts focus on developing, testing, and qualifying both robotic and handheld cold spray applications for corrosion mitigation, dimensional restoration, and structural repair of aircraft components and government assets. ES3 provides rapid sustainment services that restore damaged substrates to original dimensions without compromising the structural integrity of the substrate metal.

Today, ES3 is a leader in designing and qualifying turn-key cold spray systems (Centerline, Centerline EPX, Inovati, VRC Gen III, and others) to meet the specific requirement of industrial users. We operate three of our own robotic cold spray systems where we develop and qualify repairs for the aerospace and defense industry. At our Abilene Facility, we provide production repairs on a variety of parts for the B-1 aircraft. To learn more, read about our Abilene Facility at this hyperlink: https://www.es3inc.com/facilities/abilene/

Qualified Cold Spray repairs conducted at our Abilene Facility.

Laser Assisted Cold Spray

ES3 is developing Laser Assisted Cold Spray (LACS) applications where the Cold Spray process is enhanced by a 4kW laser which improves the bonding efficiency of the cold sprayed particles. With LACS, we have achieved comparable and even superior performance characteristics when running mixed gases. This eliminates the need for pure helium, resulting in significant cost savings.

Laser Assisted Cold Spray Gun used by ES3 to perform extensive testing to quantify the beneftis of LACS for a variety of aerospace applications.

With LACS, ES3 achieved significant cost reductions and in some cases, superior cohesion strength.

A magnified view of Cold Sprayed test specimen slice shows that laser assisted cold spray results in a higher density deposition.

Handheld Cold Spray and AI Verified Cold Spray

ES3 has been operating three robotic Cold Spray systems performing qualified production cold spray repairs on aircraft parts for over three years. We have compiled a vast amount of data, including:

pre-production Cold Spray coupon application data
pre-production Cold Spray coupon test results including destructive testing
post-production Cold Spray coupon application data, and
post-production Cold Spray coupon test results including destructive testing.

We have used this large data set to train an AI system. Our AI System recognizes and guides hand-held spray operations to ensure the hand-held operation stays within all parameters needed for high-quality Cold Spray repairs. ES3’s AI technology brings the certainty of a robotic Cold Spray operation to on-aircraft, hand-held Cold Spray operations.

ES3 staff providing on-aircraft, hand-held cold spray repairs.

Advancing Aerospace Technologies for More Than 25 Years

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