Microstructure and failure analysis of suspension plasma sprayed thermal barrier coatings

Improvements in performance of thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) used in gas turbine engines are highly desired as they can result in higher engine efficiency leading to reduction of harmful emissions. Suspension plasma spraying (SPS) has been shown to produce high performance porous columnar TBCs that can provide low thermal conductivity and high durability. Apart from the topcoat microstructure and chemistry, the lifetime of TBCs is also dependent on bondcoat microstructure and chemistry, and topcoat-bondcoat interface roughness. In case of SPS TBCs, the interface roughness can significantly affect the columnar topcoat microstructure, thus making the bondcoat selection even more crucial. In this work, six different sets of samples were produced by fabricating bondcoats with conventional atmospheric plasma spraying (APS), high velocity air fuel (HVAF) spraying, or hybrid water/argon stabilised plasma (WSP-H) gun, and SPS topcoats using axial SPS (ASPS) or WSP-H spray guns. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of varying the topcoat microstructure, bondcoat microstructure and topcoat-bondcoat interface roughness on oxide growth behaviour and thermal cyclic fatigue (TCF) lifetime of SPS TBCs. Samples after failure were investigated to understand the failure mechanism in each case. The results showed that changing the bondcoat spray process and spray gun resulted in significant variation in bondcoat surface roughness. A porous columnar structure was created by the ASPS process, while a feathery columnar structure was created by the WSP-H spray gun in this study. Samples with WSP-H bondcoat resulted in highest cyclic lifetime in this study, despite showing severe oxidation of the bondcoat as compared to APS and HVAF bondcoats. This result could be attributed to the very high bondcoat surface roughness in these samples that could have resulted in improved mechanical anchoring of the topcoat. The HVAF bondcoats showed the best oxidation resistance in this study. •Different spray processes and spray guns utilised to produce six sets of samples.•WSP-H bondcoat resulted in highest Ra roughness of about 15 μm.•HVAF bondcoat showed the best oxidation resistance under thermal cycling.•Samples with WSP-H bondcoats showed the highest TCF lifetime.•High lifetime attributed to the very high topcoat-bondcoat interface roughness.