Copper coated steel containers are being developed for the disposal of high level nuclear waste using
processes such as cold spray and electrodeposition. Electron Back-Scatter Diffraction has been used to
determine the microstructural properties and the quality of the steel-copper coating interface. The influence
of the nature of the cold-spray carrier gas as well as its temperature and pressure (velocity) on
the coating's plastic strain and recrystallization behaviour have been investigated, and one
commercially-produced electrodeposited coating characterized. The quality of the coatings was assessed
using the coincident site lattice model to analyse the properties of the grain boundaries. For cold spray
coatings the grain size and number of coincident site lattice grain boundaries increased, and plastic strain
decreased, with carrier gas velocity. In all cases annealing improved the quality of the coatings by
increasing texture and coincidence site-lattices, but also increased the number of physical voids, especially
when a low temperature cold spray carrier gas was used. Comparatively, the average grain size and
number of coincident site-lattices was considerably larger for the strongly textured electrodeposited
coating. Tensile testing showed the electrodeposited coating was much more strongly adherent to the
steel substrate.