Numerical Simulation of the Coating Process of some Metals by Electrical Discharge Deposition

Abstract

The paper deals with research on a hybrid technique of coating by Electrical Discharge Deposition (EDD) which has the advantage of lower costs than the other similar methods. This is due to the possibility of using a usual electrical discharge machine, with common tooling, aided by electromagnetic coils that increase the precision and the quality of deposed layers. Some metallic materials like W, Al, Ni, and Ti of high purity are used for EDD, which could be taken from available wires providers. Numerical simulation of the EDD process, using the metals mentioned above was achieved in Comsol Multiphysics. Two connected modules (physics) were used: Magnetic Fields that produced the magnetic force that actuated each of these four categories of ions and Charged Particle Tracing that highlighted the distribution of particles on different cut planes – Poincare maps. Based on these results provided by numerical simulation, it was possible to evaluate the ions behavior, in comparison to electrons, during EDD that is influenced by their atomic mass and the charge number.