Degradation of protective Al-Si coatings during exploitation of gas turbine blades

Diffusion Al-Si coatings are often used to protect rotor blades of aircraft engines against high-temperature corrosion in environments containing sulfur compounds. Besides other microstructural changes, the degradation of AlSi layers can be indicated by an increasing amount of surface oxide phases and changes in parameters of the layer geometry. In practice, the time-temperature area beyond a critical temperature of the outgoing gas is used as an empirical exploitation parameter D indicating a degradation level. The efficiency of such approach was investigated by analyzing degradation features in the surface layers of rotor blades after exploitations corresponding to different values of D. Determined simple relationships between the relative thickness of degraded layer and the parameter D verify the methodology and yield its clear geometrical interpretation. However, this method fails to provide reasonable information in case when the gas is burning outside the combustion chamber due to a sudden decrease of turbine revolutions.