New Environmental-Thermal Barrier Coatings for Ultrahigh Temperature Alloys

11/2020, ARPA-E

HighT-Tech is participating a new ARPA-E project with the University of Maryland to leverage a newly invented, ultrafast high-temperature sintering (UHS) method to perform fast exploration of new environmental-thermal barrier coatings (ETBCs) for 1300°C (2372 °F)-capable refractory alloys for harsh turbine environments.

UHS enables ultrafast synthesis of high-melting oxide coatings, including multilayers, in less than a minute, enabling rapid evaluation of novel coating compositions. By using UHS with fast-fail tests and modeling and analytics tools, the team will be able to explore hundreds of compositions and coating architectures to design and optimize 1700°C (3092 °F)-capable ETBCs with different layer sequences, thicknesses, porosity levels, and novel compositions.