Desktop Manufacturing of Plasma Sprayed Coating and Computational Estimation of Its Mechanical Properties

Plasma-sprayed coatings are obtained through experimental iterations ofvarious spraying parameters. The material properties of such coatings aregreatly influenced by the particle temperature, impact velocities, and substratepre-heat temperature. These are critical parameters that yield a uniquemicrostructure with distinctive splat morphology, inter-splat boundaries, andvolume fraction of heterogeneous phases. Due to this, experimentaloptimization of such coatings is an exhaustive iterative process that leads toexcessive time and resource utilization. Splat simulations for feedstockparticles are obtained using a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool.These simulated splats are modeled stochastically to obtain a simulated 3-dimensional plasma sprayed bulk. The goal is to develop a methodology tosimulate the computational microstructure of plasma sprayed Al2O3 andestimate the mechanical response of the coating using microstructure-basedanalysis. Object Oriented Finite element analysis (OOF2) is an image-basednumerical analysis tool developed by the National Institute of Standards andTechnology (NIST). It can account for actual microstructural characteristicsand evaluate the thermal and mechanical properties of heterogeneousmaterials. Development of this “Desktop Manufacturing Protocol” for plasmasprayed coatings will reduce the number of experiments required to obtain thebulk and its microstructure of desired thermo-mechanical properties.