A new plasma spray system fires liquid ceramic precursors at three times the speed of sound to build aerospace coatings atom-by-atom. Current methods for developing ceramic coatings—used to protect jet engine components from extreme heat, corrosion, and wear—are slow, wasteful, and poorly suited to mass production. This project replaces solid ceramic powders with liquid feedstocks, which are cheaper to produce and allow far finer control over the final material’s internal structure. The researcher will build computer models and high-throughput plasma processing tools that can tailor a coating’s pore size, shape, and distribution to match a specific function—whether that is insulating a turbine blade, shielding a ceramic composite from steam, or conducting ions in a fuel cell for an electric aircraft. If successful, the technique could cut manufacturing costs and waste while enabling ceramic coatings with properties that current methods cannot achieve. The work targets aerospace propulsion, but the same approach could apply to any system that needs a thin, durable ceramic layer with precisely tuned thermal, electrical, or environmental performance.
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Ceramics are an important group of materials and their processing into aerospace coatings and components requires specialist techniques. Current methodologies for new materials discovery and development are wasteful, energy inefficient, and not representative of the production scale environment. This Early Career Fellowship in the priority area of Advanced Materials Engineering will demonstrate that new ceramic compositions can be processed from liquids with a high power, high efficiency and high velocity three cathode plasma source with axial injection as the primary technique. My vision is to establish modelling tools and advanced materials processing techniques that will enable the design and manufacture of advanced ceramic coatings and components with tailored microstructure with thermal, electrical and environmental barrier properties fine-tuned to their desired applications. This will enable unique microstructure of ceramic coatings coupled with fine-tuned thermal, environmental and electrical properties for thermal barrier coatings in the aero gas turbines, environmental barrier coatings for ceramic matrix composites in those turbines, electrolytes for fuel cells and solar cells in auxiliary power generation for electric aircraft, dielectric coatings for aero electric motors, wear and high temperature oxidation and corrosion resistant coatings for various critical components in the aero-engine. To facilitate widespread industrial uptake, I will develop a new high throughput process with reduced waste and improved sustainability based on high power, high velocity plasma, enabling the production of tailored ceramic coatings and components of the required nanostructure and microstructure of the required pore architecture in large volumes at a fraction of a cost of current techniques. This will enable the manufacture of coatings with bespoke compositions and provide unprecedented control of pore size, shape, fraction and distribution which are essential for thermal, environmental and electrical properties of these coatings. The integrated approach to materials discovery and manufacture will lead to creation of products for the aerospace industry with improved properties, performances and reduced materials processing times, in line with the aims of the fellowship priority area.
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