Review on Cold Spray Process and Technology: Part I—Intellectual Property

The number of research papers as well as of patents and patent applications on cold spray and cold spray related technologies has grown exponentially in the current decade. This rapid growth of activity brought a tremendous amount of information on this technology in a short period of time. The main motivation for this review is to summarize the rapidly expanding common knowledge on cold spray to help researchers and engineers already or soon to be involved for their future endeavors with this new technology. Cold spray is one of the various names for describing an all-solid-state coating process that uses a high-speed gas jet to accelerate powder particles toward a substrate where they plastically deform and consolidate upon impact. Cold gas dynamic spray, cold spray, kinetic spray, supersonic particle deposition, dynamic metallization or kinetic metallization are all terminologies found in the literature that designate the above-defined coating process. This review on cold spray technology is divided into two parts. In this article, Part I, patents and patent applications related to this process are reviewed, starting from the first few mentions of the idea at the beginning of the 20th century to its practical discovery in Russia in the 1980s and its subsequent occidental development and commercialization. The patent review encompasses Russian and USA patents and patent applications. Part II will review the scientific literature giving a general perspective of the current understanding and capability of this process.