Thermal Spray Robot: ABB Arms in Coating Booths

A thermal spray robot holds a gun that heats metal or ceramic powder and fires it at a part, building a coating on turbine blades, valve balls, shafts and engine parts. A person holding the gun in a loud booth struggles to lay down the same thickness twice, so coating shops moved the gun onto robot arms long ago. This post goes from Max Ulrich Schoop's first metal spraying patent in 1909 to plasma spray booths and cold spray. Then it looks at the US Navy repair facility certified for cold spray this September, and at where ABB robots such as the IRB 2600 and IRB 4600 already work inside commercial spray machines.

A high velocity air fuel (HVAF) gun spraying a coating onto a rotating shaft. Photo: Lreames / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How metal spraying went from a garden wall to plasma booths

Metal spraying started with a children's game. In spring 1909 the Swiss engineer Max Ulrich Schoop watched his children shooting small Flobert guns in a park in Bois-Colombes, near Paris, and noticed that the lead pellets had left a coating where they splashed against a garden wall. He went on to fire tin and lead granules from small cannons, and on 28 April 1909 he filed the basic patent for metal spraying in Berlin. It was granted four years later. Flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the classic processes, were developed between 1910 and 1920 and are still widely used.

A Flobert rifle, the kind of small gun Schoop's children were shooting in 1909. Photo: Hmaag / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

For decades the gun stayed in a worker's hands. A sprayer stood in a booth with the part on a turning fixture and swept the gun back and forth, laying down coatings against corrosion and wear or building up worn crankshafts. The plasma arc brought a much hotter heat source. Robert Gage's plasma torch, invented at Union Carbide in 1953 and patented in 1957, could also spray hard metals onto other metals, and one early job was coating the turbine blades of the Saturn V rocket. Plasma spray jets run above 15,000 K, hot enough to melt the ceramics used in thermal barrier coatings.

Plasma spraying a cylinder head by hand on a turntable. Photo: Optimi3e / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots took over the gun because coating thickness depends on keeping speed, distance and angle steady over every pass, and because spray booths are loud and full of dust and fumes. A six-axis arm repeats the same path on every part, and a typical thermal spray system now lists robotic manipulation next to the torch, the powder or wire feeder, the gas supply, the power supply and the controls. High velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF) guns, which push particles faster than 1,000 m/s, came in the 1980s. Cold spray, found by Russian scientists who saw coatings form by accident during erosion experiments in a wind tunnel, was commercialized in the 1990s.

A robot held plasma spray gun aimed at a cylindrical part in a lathe chuck. Photo: Optimi3e / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cold spray repairs and coating cells in 2026

On 28 September 2026 DVIDS reported that the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport, in Washington state, had become the second Navy warfare center, after Carderock, to have its cold spray facility and quality assurance program approved by Naval Sea Systems Command. Keyport uses a robotic cold spray work cell inside a spray booth to repair three-way ball valves, submarine mast and radar shafts, pressurized piping and eroded or corroded surfaces on shipboard parts. According to the article, the process cuts turnaround on three-way ball valve repairs by 9 to 15 percent and reduces repair attempts by up to 42 percent.

Aluminium samples on a rotating fixture during plasma spraying with copper, 2019. Photo: Student-julia-pwr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Cold spray works without melting. Pressurized, heated gas fires metal powder at high speed, and the particles bond to the part, so there is no heat-affected zone and none of the warping that welding can cause. "Cold spray provides a relatively cost-effective means to repair areas where there might be erosion over time," said Andy Bloom, who heads Keyport's mechanical engineering applied technology branch. Other defense users are buying as well. On 14 September Titomic announced a US$5.0 million US defense contract for a next-generation cold spray system bound for an Air Force base in Oklahoma, and in August SPEE3D reported taking its cold spray printing to sea.

A turbine guide vane after plasma spraying of its thermal barrier coating, part of an MTU repair process. Photo: Olivier Cleynen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB robots already work inside commercial spray machines. Oerlikon Metco builds its standard Surface One and Surface Two thermal spray platforms around six-axis robots. Surface One handles the gun with an ABB IRB 2600 or an IRB 4600 (or a Fanuc arm), and Surface Two can use the IRB 4600 to handle both the gun and the part. Both machines run atmospheric plasma spray, HVOF and combustion powder spray from one controller. The IRB 2600 carries up to 20 kg with a reach of up to 1.85 m. ABB has shown spray work at trade fairs too: at FABTECH 2012 one of its robots carried a TAFA plasma spray system.

An ABB IRB 2600 robot, one of the arms Oerlikon Metco offers for gun handling on its Surface One platform. Photo: ABB

Where robotic thermal spray goes next

Repair will probably grow fastest. Navy depots, Army helicopter shops and airlines all have worn parts that are slow or expensive to replace, and cold spray lets them rebuild the metal instead. The US Army already uses cold spray to repair a component in Black Hawk helicopters, and the Navy has adopted it across its operations on an experimental basis. Each repair needs a path that follows a worn surface, usually with the part turning on a positioner. That positioner is often run as one of the robot's external axes, so gun and part move together.

An ABB IRB 4600, the robot Oerlikon Metco's Surface platforms use for gun and part handling. Photo: ABB

A shop also has to prove each coating is right. Gun distance, angle and speed have to stay within narrow limits, and a certified facility like Keyport must show it does the job the same way every time, which is why its approval covered the quality program as well as the equipment. Spray paths are increasingly planned offline from CAD models in tools such as RobotStudio before the booth is switched on. Booths are hard on the robots too. Overspray dust gets into joints and cables, so arms in spray cells usually wear protective covers, and the noise keeps operators outside the booth.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

People meet thermal spray mostly through the things it protects, such as gas turbines that make electricity, aircraft engines, and the pumps and valves in water and energy systems. On 2 October 2026 Pipeline and Gas Journal reported that Precision Spray & Coatings had added spray and fuse coatings to its valve services. Cost and skills will decide how far robot spraying spreads to smaller shops, since a certified cell needs both coating know-how and robot programming. Smaller cobots such as ABB's GoFa could one day carry light cold spray nozzles for small repairs, but no maker has announced such a package yet.

Inside an industrial gas turbine, the kind of machine whose blades get thermal barrier coatings. Photo: Nabonaco / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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