The investigation of change in thermal conductivity of porous coatings during the aging process

Exposure of the TBCs layers to high temperatures for a long time causes sintering in the ceramic layer, resulting in changes in the porosity. Since the thermal conductivity of air in the porosity of the layers is much lower than the ceramic material in the coating, a decrease or increase in the percentage of porosity will end up with changes in the conductivity of the layer, which subsequently affect the overall efficiency. In this study, a TBC was first applied to the prepared samples from Inconel738 turbine blades. The samples were subjected to an aging process in the furnace for a specified time. The porosity changes in the ceramic layer of the coating during the aging process were investigated using image processing of the SEM images. The porosity of the images obtained from SEM and thermal conductivity in different porosities were determined by OOF2 and ImageJ software, respectively. To validate the numerical results, temperature distribution on the thermal barrier coatings is obtained by the analytical solution of the Fourier equation. According to the analysis performed on the SEM images gathered from the samples during different aging hours, it is observed that by increasing the aging hours during 48 hours, the percentage of porosity of the whole ceramic layer decreased by 8%. According to the results, by decreasing porosity in the ceramic layer, an increase in thermal conductivity has been observed, followed by an increase in the substrate's temperature and a decrease in the overall performance over time.