Relevance of inter-particle interaction in directed energy deposition powder stream

Blown powder dynamics is one of the aspects of Directed Energy Deposition (DED) with a major influence on deposition quality and potential for improvement in simulation. Most currently employed computational models discard powder grain collisions as negligible, although little explicit evidence for that claim exists. A Discrete Element Method approach is thus employed in the present work to simulate the actual number of grain collisions in a powder stream of a commercial discrete coaxial nozzle and how that number varies with the key processing parameters. While the number of powder grain collisions is found to in fact be negligible at one side of the usable parameter spectrum, the opposite side results in as many as 84% of all the powder grains being involved in inter-granular collisions with an average rebound angle of 14°, challenging the established hypothesis of the negligibility of this phenomena.