Low Cost Corrosion and Oxidation Resistant Coatings for Improved System Reliability

In order to improve high-temperature oxidation and corrosion resistance of critical superalloy components in turbine engines innovative processing methods must be devised to improve coating and materials properties at a higher reliability and lower costs. Whether or not thermal barrier coating are applied to the engine components, the resistance to oxidation and hot corrosion relies on metallic coatings protecting the superalloy substrate. These metallic coatings are commonly either diffusion aluminides or MCrAlY overlays (where M=Ni, Co, Fe, Ni+Co, etc). Compared with diffusion coatings, MCrAlY coatings are more flexible in terms of composition selection for achieving a more balanced combination of coating properties and having a lower ductile to brittle transition temperature, which makes them more resistant to cracking upon thermal cycling. Several techniques have been developed to deposit MCrAlY coatings including physical vapor deposition, electrolytic codeposition, electrophoresis, and autocatalytic electroless deposition, of which electrolytic codeposition appears to be a promising, low cost, non-line of sight approach. Therefore, the overall objective of the Phase I and II programs is to create a scalable cost effective process to produce coatings that can enhance high temperature reliability and corrosion/oxidation and erosion resistance. This program will build off of Dr. Ying Zhang (Tennessee Technological University) electrolytic codeposition work and Faraday Technology's alloy coating development efforts to create a scalable process to electrolytic codeposit MCrAlY onto engine shaped components and to investigate other potential MCrAlX alloy elements that could further increase the coatings temperature resistance. If successful this program has the potential to greatly improve the oxidation and corrosion resistance of metallic coatings while also improving their reliability at higher operating temperatures and reducing their manufacturing costs.

Turbine engines serve as the primary and/or auxiliary power source for numerous NASA, DoD, and commercial enterprises. It is a desired cost-driven goal that gas turbine engines have a long lifecycle, with ability to refurbish deteriorated hardware for additional service life without replacement. While some engines have approached this goal, others have fallen significantly short. For example, time between overhauls (TBO) for 501K-34 gas turbine engine has been falling significantly short (<10,000 h) of the 25,000 h goal primarily because of hot corrosion damage noted on high pressure turbine hardware. Operational changes and future needs will require increased turbine operating temperatures and change the associated operating environment to one where Type I and Type II hot corrosion and oxidation will be prevalent in newly anticipated operational profiles.

The market consist of all potential energy consumers, the need for next generation high temperature corrosion resistant materials is critical to improving generation efficiencies and reducing production costs. However, it is believe that once optimized this process could improve energy efficiency up to 20% in steam turbine plants alone. This would be accomplished by reducing the amount of waste heat discharged from steam power systems, which is estimated at 280,000 MW. That energy is enough to provide up to 20% of the U.S. electricity needs while slashing natural resource consumption, GHG, and saving $70-150B per year on energy costs.

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