Printability of low-cost pre-heat-treated ball milled Al7075 powders using compressed air assisted cold spray additive manufacturing

•Cold spray printing using low-cost ball-milled powders was successfully demonstrated.•As-received powders were irregular in shape and size, significantly work-hardened, and consisted of very fine precipitates in its microstructure that affected its printability.•Annealing the powders resulted in significant reduction in hardness and coarsening of precipitates, thereby facilitating cold spray printability.•A deposition efficiency of 59% was realized with pre-treated powders using compressed air as propulsive gas, which is higher than the deposition efficiencies reported in published literature. A successful attempt at the cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) of low-cost ball milled Al7075 powders using air as the carrier gas is demonstrated. The irregular shape and hardness of the as-received powders are identified as a primary obstacle to the successful printability which demonstrated 0% deposition efficiency. Thus, different annealing procedures are suggested as an optimization technique to facilitate printing. These annealing procedures are compared and contrasted using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the hardness/printability of the annealed powders are correlated exactly to the enthalpies in the low temperature i.e.,