Multidisciplinary analysis of the operational temperature increase of turbine blades in combustion engines by application of the ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBC)

Abstract The improvement of the temperature resistance of the aircraft engine elements can be obtained by application of a single ceramic thermal barrier coating (TBC) (e.g. Noda [1] ) or several composite layers (e.g. Sadowski [2] ). Engine elements protected by TBC can work safely in elevated temperature range above 1000 °C. Continuous endeavour to increase thermal resistance of engine the elements requires, apart from laboratory investigations, also numerical study of the different aero-engine parts. The most important are turbine blades, where high temperatures and stress concentrations during thermal shocks or thermal fatigue can be observed during engine exploitation. The high temperatures and stress concentrations can act as the local sources of damage initiation and defects propagation in the form of cracks. The present paper deals with the solution of the transient temperature transfer problem in bare and thermal barrier coated alloy Inconel 713 for the temperature range up to 1000 °C. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) part of analysis was performed by application of ANSYS Fluent code receiving the temperature field of combustion gas, whereas computational structural mechanics (CMS) part concerning the temperature distribution inside the turbine blade was done by ABAQUS. Finally, the efficiency of the TBC layer (0.5 mm thickness) protecting and cooling channels was discussed in order to explore the operational temperature increase in the aero-engines.

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