Adhesion tests for thermal spray coatings:: correlation of bond strength and interfacial toughness

In this paper, experiments for determining the adhesion properties have been performed using two test methods; tensile adhesive test which is widely used in industry and interfacial indentation test still under development in research laboratories. Therefore, only few experimental data on the accuracy of the methods and on the potential in an industrial context are available. For that reason, dissimilar coating-substrate combinations covering different ranges of type of thermal spray coating-substrate systems were tested. Ceramic ( Al2O3) and metallic ( 80Ni - 20Cr) coatings were deposited by flame spraying system with two different thicknesses on titanium alloy and steel substrates exhibiting each two distinct roughness levels. The distinguished coating properties include the interfacial toughness and adhesive strength. The impacts of interfacial roughness and the thickness of the coating on the adhesion were conducted, and some adhesion tendency was also observed. Typical bond strength values measured were from 40 up to 100 MPa, and the interfacial toughness obtained from 1 to 4 MPa m(0.5). The correlation of tensile adhesive strength and interfacial toughness has been discussed.