Thermal barrier coatings design with increased reflectivity and lower thermal conductivity for high-temperature turbine applications

High reflectance thermal barrier coatings consisting of 7% Yittria-Stabilized Zirconia (7YSZ) and Al2O3 were deposited by co-evaporation using electron beam physical vapor deposition (EB-PVD). Multilayer 7YSZ and Al2O3 coatings with fixed layer spacing showed a 73% infrared reflectance maxima at 1.85 mu m wavelength. The variable 7YSZ and Al2O3 multilayer coatings showed an increase in reflection spectrum from 1 to 2.75 mu m. Preliminary results suggest that coating reflectance can be tailored to achieve increased reflectance over a desired wavelength range by controlling the thickness of the individual layers. In addition, microstructural enhancements were also used to produce low thermal conductive and high hemispherical reflective thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) in which the coating flux was periodically interrupted creating modulated strain fields within the TBC. TBC showed no macrostructural differences in the grain size or faceted surface morphology at low magnification as compared with standard TBC. The residual stress state was determined to be compressive in all of the TBC samples, and was found to decrease with increasing number of modulations. The average thermal conductivity was shown to decrease approximately 30% from 1.8 to 1.2 W/m-K for the 20-layer monolithic TBC after 2 h of testing at 1316 degrees C. Monolithic modulated TBC also resulted in a 28% increase in the hemispherical reflectance, and increased with increasing total number of modulations.