<title>Tunable elastic stiffness of plasma-sprayed zirconia coatings</title>

Abstract

Plasma-sprayed zirconia is widely used in aero-engines as thermal barrier coating material. The material has an open porosity and a network of very thin microcracks. The porosity and the microcracks give rise to the low elastic stiffness. When the plasm sprayed zirconia is immersed in a liquid the microcracks can be filled with the liquid by capillary forces. Although there is only a small amount of infiltrated material the zirconia shows a strong increase in elastic stiffness. We have measured the elastic behavior after infiltration and as function of temperature by ultrasonic pulse echo technique. It could be observed that the solidification of the infiltrated fluid at lower temperatures leads to a further increase of the elastic stiffness. The temperature controlled liquid-solid phase transition can therefore be used to change reversibly the elastic properties of this ceramic material. The desired switching temperature can be chosen by appropriate fluids. A possible application of this material is the vibration damping of coated structures by temperature controlled changing of resonance frequencies.© (1999) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.