Development of Marinized Protective Coatings for Higher Temperature Operations of Marine Gas Turbine Engines

The marine environment is extremely corrosive to turbine engine components due to salt exposures from the sea, the presence of fuel impurities and the high temperatures experienced. To cope with future operational requirements, a strong need exists to develop novel, protective coatings to provide environmental protection from hot corrosion and oxidation conditions across a wide range of operating temperatures. To address this issue, this program will employ novel compositions and advanced processing methods to apply corrosion-resistant coatings onto marine turbine engine components such as blades and vanes. Integrated Computational Materials and Engineering (ICME) techniques will be used to aid compositional development by assessing the compatibility of the coating(s) with substrate alloys in terms of the activity matching of key components and determining the thermodynamics of multi-salt sulfate deposits to assess their liquidus temperature and stability with alumina and/or chromia scales. DVTI will use its production scale coater to apply the selected coatings onto test samples to demonstrate the desired composition, microstructure and non-line-of-sight coating deposition capability. Samples will then be tested for their resistance to Type I and II hot corrosion and oxidation degradation under dual-cycle conditions intended to duplicate the hot corrosion and oxidation damage found in practice.