Plasma sprayed K2Ti6O13 as thermal barrier coatings with high thermal swing for diesel piston enabled by inter-splat bonding and porosity tailoring

Thermal swing coatings with high thermal diffusivity but low thermal conductivity could increase the efficiency of diesel engines by minimizing the piston surface thermal gradient. However, the thermal diffusivity is usually positively related to the thermal conductivity and thus it is generally difficult to deposit thermal barrier coating with a low thermal conductivity but high thermal diffusivity by plasma spraying. In the present work, K2Ti6O13 with intrinsic low thermal conductivity and low melting point (1350 °C) was used as the coating material to prepare a coating with a high ratio of thermal diffusivity to thermal conductivity. Results revealed that due to the low melting point feature of K2Ti6O13 all plasma sprayed coatings have high inter-splat bonding quality which resulted in a high thermal diffusivity close to the sintered counterpart. K2Ti6O13 coatings of high porosity were plasma sprayed by optimizing powder structure, which leads to a low thermal conductivity but influences little the thermal diffusivity. It is also found that the preferential evaporation of potassium oxide from the K2Ti6O13 molten droplets leads to the formation of the TiO2 phase and generates global pores in the coating. At optimized spray conditions by using sintered porous powder, the K2Ti6O13 coating with a porosity of 21 % and single K2Ti6O13 phase reveals the lowest thermal conductivity of 0.85 W/m·K and a high diffusivity of 0.43 mm2/s. The coating exhibits the highest thermal swing of about 91 °C, having much higher performance than the conventional thermal barrier coatings used for enhancing the thermal swing effect.