Effect of powder injection on the interfacial fracture toughness of plasma-sprayed zirconia

Adhesive strength of the plasma-sprayed thermal barrier coating is one of the most important parameters which influence their durability and reliability during service. While many methods exist to measure the adhesive strength, in general, they require cumbersome and time-consuming specimen preparation. Furthermore, considerations of the adhesion strength from the point-of-view of fracture toughness or for that matter, their systematic correlation to both processing variances are limited. Consequently, there is an opportunity to both simplify the measurement procedure and establish correlations among methods and linkages between processing parameters and interfacial fracture toughness. In this paper, we report results on adhesion strength of plasma-sprayed yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) coating on aluminum substrates based on both interfacial indentation test (to measure interfacial fracture toughness) and the modified tensile adhesive test. Carrier gas flow for powder injection into the plasma torch was systematically varied to introduce variances in particle melting with concomitant impact on the measured adhesive strength. The results indicate the correlation between the particle melting index and the measured interfacial fracture toughness.