Magnetically controlled deposition of metals using gas plasma. Quarterly progress report, April--June 1997

The objective of the grant is to develop a method of spraying materials on a substrate in a controlled manner to eliminate the waste inherent in present plating processes. The process under consideration is magnetically controlled plasma spraying. As noted in the last several quarterly reports, the project is no longer on schedule. Difficulties with modeling compressible flow caused a slip in the schedule. The field equations have been cast in a format that allows solution using Finite Element (FE) techniques. The development of the computer code that will allow evaluation of the proposed technique and design of an experiment to prove the proposed process is complete. Work last quarter was centered on validating the magnetic field equation and developing the mesh for the final plasma torch flow problem. Results of a test problem used to validate the magnetic calculation were included with the second quarterly report in 1997. The effort this quarter focused on running the actual plasma spray model on the finite element code, and developing a stand alone code (SPRAY.for) that will be used to calculate the trajectory of the particles used for plating the substrate