Session: 04-02 Emerging Technologies: Novel AM Design

Paper Number: 92258

92258 - Roll-to-Roll for Cold Spray Manufacturing Processes 

In the area of flexible electronic devices, numerous additive manufacturing techniques are being researched. Cold spray is an additive manufacturing process, in which metal particles are impacted on the substrates through a nozzle at a supersonic velocity and low temperature. The metal particle material is deformed and bonded together creating a layer-by-layer feature to form a part or component. Using computer-controlled manipulators or specialized robotic arms intricate shape components can be fabricated. The cold spray technique offers a wide range of applications in the field of aerospace, automobile, marine, biomedical, machinery, and energy sectors. However, with the increasing demand for electronic devices, it is essential to scale up the cold spray technique to meet the high production rate, large area, and low cost of manufacturing. Thus, to overcome this limitation, integrating the cold spray technique with the roll-to-roll (R2R) process would be an effective solution.

In general, the R2R process is a continuous fabrication technique that embeds, coats, prints, or laminates varying patterns onto a flexible rolled substrate material as that material is fed in the form of a web from one roller onto another. The technique performs additive or subtractive fabrication on the substrate as the substrate web moves to create or produce a product or part. The substrate material can be paper, foil, plastic films, textiles, metals, and composite nanomaterials. Compared to conventional methods, roll-to-roll manufacturing improves life-cycle costs and increases the scale of operation, making it a viable and cost-effective approach to manufacturing. Benefits of roll-to-roll manufacturing include increased efficiency, multiple sequential processing steps, high production rates, and larger size substrate can be used which ultimately reduce manufacturing costs and time.

In our project, we designed and demonstrated an R2R platform for large-scale cold spray at a scale that is compatible with the commercially available cold spray system. An R2R testbed was designed for the cold spray process station. The R2R stage consists of one unwind roller, one motorized rewind roller, two idler rollers and can hold the large metal rolls of width 21-24 inches. The motorized rollers controlled the torque and web’s moving speed, and unwind roller provided a smooth adjustable tension to the web. Rollers were aligned using a laser beam and integrated with a cold spray system. Various types of substrate materials are considered in the R2R testbed for cold spray, including polymer, steel, copper, and others. Overall, we focused on design, fabrication, assembly of unwind and rewind machines, the alignment between the rollers, and web tension calculation for establishing an integrated system of cold spray and roll to roll system. Additionally, since the tension of the web is a critical process parameter for this system, we performed tensile test experiments on the steel and copper rolls using a universal testing machine to find an acceptable tension setup for the testbed.

Presenting Author: Xian Du University of Massachusetts Amherst

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. Xian Du is an Assistant Professor with the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and Institute for Applied Life Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA. Before 2018, he was a research scientist at the Laboratory for Manufacturing Productivity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research topic is the roll-to-roll flexible electronics printing technologies for wearable devices, and the innovation of real-time, high-resolution, and large-volume intelligent sensing and pattern recognition technologies for manufacturing process control and medical devices. His research interests include flexible electronics manufacturing, robotics, intelligent sensing, metrology, and physics-integrated machine intelligence. Dr. Du was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2020 and is also a member of the IEEE, ASME, and OSA.

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