Deposition of lamellae well bonded dense ceramic coatings by plasma spraying through materials design

It is usually difficult to deposit dense ceramic coatings with splats well bonded by plasma spraying at room temperature. Following the recent research progress on the splat interface bonding formation, it was found that there is a well defined relationship between the critical bonding temperature and materials melting point. Thus, it was proposed to control the lamellae bonding through the deposition temperature. In this study, to examine the feasibility of the bonding theory, a novel approach for the development of coating microstructure through materials design is proposed. Accordingly typical ceramic materials were selected of relative low melting point for plasma spraying of dense coating with well bonded splats. The experiment was conducted by using K₂Ti₆O₁₃ for splat deposition at ∼110°C cooling down from a higher temperature to avoid substrate adsorbates and coating was deposited at room temperature in ambient temperature without substrate preheating. Results show that the splat is fully bonded with a ceramic substrate, while the coatings present a dense microstructure with a similar fracture morphology to sintered bulk ceramics. Moreover, the erosion test at 90° further confirmed the formation of a ceramic coating with lamellae fully bonded.