In-Situ Sensors and Non-Destructive Examination Tools to Assess Integrity of Thermal Sprayed Amorphous Coatings on Ship Decks

ReliaCoat Technologies, LLC a spin-off from Stony Brook University in partnership with Argonne, Sandia and Praxair TAFA, proposes a two pronged approach to address requirements of developing coating integrity monitoring tools for thermal sprayed amorphous corrosion and wear resistant coatings. For successful implementation of these coatings on ship-deck surfaces, it is critical ensure that coating deposition is optimized to eliminate “extrinsic” defects such as porosity, cracks and delamination and to prevent their occurrence during service. Of further importance is maintaining the amorphous structure within the coating both as-deposited and in-service. For effective implementation of non-destructive coating examination (NDE) tools, correlations are envisaged through this SBIR partnership between intrinsic coating characteristics (residual stresses, modulus, adhesion) and potential monitoring tools such as thermal imaging tomography. ReliaCoat will benchmark NDE tools by first employing its in situ coating property sensor to characterize key features of optimized and non-optimized coatings (including its evolution) and subject them to a battery of NDE tests so that the most appropriate system can be selected. The coatings will also be subjected to accelerate laboratory degradation and reanalyzed to determine the measurement sensitivity on degraded coatings. A frame work for implementation on ship deck will also be developed.