Testing of Thermal Barrier Coatings by Laser Excitation

Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are used to increase the operating temperature of land-, sea-, or air-based turbines. As failure of the coating may result in serious damage of the turbine, reliable estimation of the lifetime is essential. Most experiments to assess the lifetime or to determine parameters for simulations of the behavior of TBCs are done by burner-rig-tests, where the operating conditions are simulated by cyclic heating of the surface and cooling of the backside of a coated sample. In this work a possibility is presented to do comparable experiments by heating the surface with laser irradiation instead of a burner. For this purpose a Nd:YAG-laser with a maximum output power of 1 kW and a wavelength of 1064 nm is used. The laser spot can be moved by integrated optics across the sample surface to achieve homogeneous heating of the coating. Cooling of the backside is done by air. The temperature of the sample surface is determined by an infrared-camera which also enables the possibility to detect failures in the coating via thermography. Additionally, acoustic sensors attached to the sample holder are used to detect failures in the sample. The investigated ceramic material (yttria stabilized zirconia) has a very low absorption coefficient at the used laser wavelength. Therefore, a pre-treatment of the samples was needed to increase the absorption coefficient to be able to heat up the samples. In this paper, the experimental setup and first experimental results are presented.