Elaboration of Sol-Gel Coatings from Aerogels and Xerogels of Doped Zirconia for TBC Applications

Thermal Barrier Coatings (TBCs) are used as insulators on hot section components to reduce operating temperatures in aircraft engines and industrial gas turbine. The TBC system consists of two layers: the ceramic top coat traditionally Yttria Stabilized Zirconia (YSZ) with a low conductivity, and the bond coat generally MCrAlY, M=Ni and/or Cr or Co or Pd or Pt modified aluminides. In the industry, two dry-route processes used to deposit TBCs give quite different microstructures of coatings. In one hand, coatings resulted by plasma spraying (PS) present a lamellar microstruture with a low thermal conductivity in the range from 0.7 to 0.9 Wm−1K−1. In the other hand, Electron Beam Physical Vapour Deposition (EBPVD) coatings with columnar microstruture coatings present the best mechanical performances but perpendicular orientation of the columns makes their thermal conductivity twice higher compared to PS coatings. The present study proposes the elaboration of zirconia coatings via the sol-gel route combined with dip-coating process. It is a versatile process able to produce either thin ceramic coatings or thick deposits. The main advantage of this method is to decrease the crystallization temperature, much lower than conventional processes. Moreover, the sol-gel process is a nondirectional deposition technique, which is very different to the physical methods described above. Doped zirconia have been chosen to constitute isolating multilayers coatings. Sol formulation, slurries stability but also dip-coating conditions have been optimized in order to obtain homogeneous layers on nickel based superalloys substrates.