Determination of thermal spray coating property with curvature measurements

Real-time curvature measurement of a coating-substrate system during deposition has facilitated the monitoring of coating stresses and provided additional insights into thermal spray deposition mechanisms. However, the non-equilibrium state of coating formation along with harsh spray booth environment introduces complexity not only in data interpretation but also in the coating properties estimation. In this paper, a new procedure is proposed to estimate the elastic modulus of thermal sprayed ceramic coatings using in situ curvature and temperature measurements. In order to correlate the measurable parameters to coating elastic modulus, a systematic study is conducted to develop a suitable methodology. First, various finite element model analyses are carried out to formulate suitable relations between the measurements and elastic modulus. Subsequently, experiments are conducted to validate the procedure to estimate coating moduli. The results are compared with more accurate measurements obtained from post-deposition characterization technique under low temperature thermal cycles. The comparison suggests that the moduli estimated using the proposed procedure are in good agreements with those obtained from the post-deposition technique. Further, the nonlinear response of coatings are evaluated from the estimated moduli during deposition and cool down, which offer additional information on the characteristics of thermal spray coatings.