Reliability of plasma-sprayed coatings: monitoring the plasma spray process and improving the quality of coatings

As for every coating technology, the reliability and reproducibility of coatings are essential for the development of the plasma spraying technology in industrial manufacturing. They mainly depend on the process reliability, equipment and spray booth maintenance, operator training and certification, implementation and use of consistent production practices and standardization of coating testing. This paper deals with the first issue, that is the monitoring and control of the plasma spray process; it does not tackle the coating characterization and testing methods. It begins with a short history of coating quality improvement under plasma spray conditions over the last few decades, details the plasma spray torches used in the industry, the development of the measurements of in-flight and impacting particle parameters and then of sensors. It concludes with the process maps that describe the interrelations between the operating parameters of the spray process, in-flight particle characteristics and coating properties and with the potential of in situ monitoring of the process by artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic methods.