Jet engine turbine blades face a hidden threat: sand and dust sucked into the engine melt into a glassy substance called CMAS that eats through protective ceramic coatings, causing blades to fail. This project builds a new type of coating where each microscopic building block has a tough ceramic core wrapped in a thin, CMAS-resistant shell. When molten CMAS tries to seep in, the shell reacts with it to form solid crystals that block further penetration, while the core maintains the coating’s structural strength. Current coatings force engineers to choose between resistance to CMAS attack and resistance to cracking; this core-shell design delivers both. If successful, the approach could double or triple the lifespan of engine hot-section components, reducing maintenance costs and improving fuel efficiency by allowing engines to run hotter. The design is also transferable to other demanding environments, such as gas turbines for power generation or industrial furnaces. The project combines powder synthesis, thermal spray deposition, and computer modelling to turn the concept into a practical coating.
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This project aims to develop new thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) for significantly extending the lifetime of critical high temperature components of aircraft engines under the attack of molten calcia-magnesia-alumina-silicate (CMAS) deposits. The idea is based on a novel core-shell microstructural design in which each building block of the coating will comprise a tough ceramic core and a thin, CMAS-resistant ceramic shell. Our hypothesis is that when the core-shell TBCs are under CMAS attack, the CMAS-resistant shells, which are engineered exclusively to CMAS infiltration pathways, will rapidly react with the infiltrating CMAS melt to generate crystalline products to stop CMAS penetration while the tough ceramic cores will provide high fracture toughness against crack propagation. The core-shell design fully capitalises the CMAS attack mechanisms, creates novel coating microstructural constituents and tailors the spatial distribution of the constituents for a combination of high CMAS resistance and fracture toughness, thereby overcoming the fundamental weaknesses of the state-of-the-art TBCs. The core-shell TBCs will be realised by synthesising core-shell powder and then translating the core-shell structure from powder to coating splats by thermal spray. The project will combine advanced powder processing, thermal spray, testing, characterisations and modelling to achieve the transformational core-shell design and develop fundamental understanding of the performance, failure mechanisms and structure-property relationships of the core-shell TBCs. The idea of the core-shell TBCs is transferable and will open new horizons for designing ceramic coatings for demanding environments.
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