Invited Paper MG-ThA6
Surface Technology Solutions: Materials Design for Aero-Engine Gas Turbine Applications

Thursday, October 31, 2013, 3:40 pm, Room 202 B

Erosion damage of aero-engine compressor gas path components occurs to aircraft operating in sandy environment. Erosion can lead to gradual changes in surface finish and component geometry, which consequently alters the dynamic response characteristics of compressor airfoils, causing premature failure. One of the approaches to deal with erosion problems in gas turbine engines is to apply protective hard coating on the component surface. Hardness and ductility are two of the key values for the design and characterization of materials that are used for surface protection. These key values largely depend on the elastic properties of the material, as described by the elastic stiffness tensor. Materials informatics approaches and high-throughput c omputational materials science methods have been employed, to explore chemistry and property space, to aid the prediction, synthesis, characterization and property optimization of promising candidate materials, for protective hard coatings systems, with enhanced erosion resistance for application to gas turbine airfoils. These generic methods have been employed to explore multidimensional property space, at a previously unavailable level of detail and to rapidly calculate thermophysical properties that are difficult to measure. Given these vast resources of structure and property data it is possible to extract trends on the structure of materials and their properties and use these results at the materials selection and design stages. These informatics approaches, coupled with ab initio quantum mechanics methodologies, provide many of the tools needed to guide materials selection via computational experiments. Examples for the application of these methods coupled with the use of experiments for the design of materials for industrial applications will be presented. The results presented will highlight the potential of this combined – informatics, theoretical and experimental – research strategy to aid the manufacturing process.