Research On Robotic Path Planning And Spraying Process For Plasma Spray Tooling

Rapid tooling (RT) has become more and more important for its low manufacturing cost and ability of rapidly responding to the market. Plasma spray metal tooling has obtained a special attention for its advantages of fewer limits on the pattern's size and spraying materials. The key problem here is how to keep formability and coating quality in rapid spray tooling. In most cases, cracking and peeling of coating will often occur when the temperature and thermal stress of coating are non-uniformed during the coating process. In rapid spray tooling, different spray path and different spray crafts bring different dynamic heat exchange necessarily, plasma spray path decide distributing of temperature field and remnants stress of spray coating. So it is necessary to layout spray path to robot plasma spray. This paper has gained shape of section of spray path and space between two paths and the aggradational efficiency of powder by measuring plasma spray path; In this paper, the author optimized the software under the VC++ platform to generate the path with circumrotate worktable by numerical control of robot spray forming, and solved the problem of unequal space of spray dots. In this paper, the author also research the relation between robot spray path and distributing of temperature field and remnants stress of spray coating, gained the conclusion that spray path of outward round shape is superior to else spray paths. Finally, the paper issues an example of a auto car cover die forming process adopting outward Z shape spray path, gained good spray coating successfully, validated the feasibility and practicability of spray path and spray crafts.