Multifunctional Coatings for Enhanced Environmental Management of Naval Aircraft Engine Compressors

USN is seeking to address corrosion and fretting wear in cold section of naval aircraft engine modules, namely compressor casings. Stainless steels, titanium alloys, and Inconel alloys are all widely used in these modules. Thermal spray coatings have been utilized as protective overlays in applications raining for nuclear energy to material processing to aviation. Overlay coatings offer an excellent platform for protection, overhaul, and sustainment of existing assets and provides a pathway for future improvement. Despite thermal sprays wide adaptability, by nature it is a line-of-sight process that may have difficulties coating features much smaller than the spray plumes characteristic dimension. This SBIR proposal seeks to develop coating solutions for NAVAIR aircraft engine compressor casings that address multiple corrosion mechanisms and simultaneous fretting wear through novel thermal spray coating designs. The proposed work seeks to leverage existing NAVAIR/OEM thermal spray infrastructure with limited secondary processing to provide a holistic and scalable coating solution primed for rapid technological insertion.  This work proposes to simultaneously address corrosion and wear in compressor casings through the use of novel thermal spray coating design. ReliaCoat Technologies plans to investigate a series of metallic, ceramic, and composite coatings with potential solutions incorporating single and multilayer coating architectures with and without the use of inorganic sealants.  The designed coating will provide resistance to fretting wear, galvanic isolation between the multiple material systems presenting the compressor, inhibit corrosion caused by the ingestion of potentially corrosive media, and have temperature stability up to at least 500°C. The proposed solution seeks to produce hybrid coating architectures manufactured by thermal spray and the application of an inorganic sealant.