Study of solid particle impact effects and coating thickness on the erosion damage

The development of high performance coatings for the protection against erosion requires understanding of their complex failure mechanisms occurring during solid particle impact. In the present work, a numerical analysis is carried out to study the effect of particle diameter, particle velocity, and coating thickness on erosion damage of gas turbine blade coating caused by solid particle erosion. For this purpose, the performance assessment of turbine blade coating is done using scanning electron microscopic testing. Furthermore, simulation of the impact of a solid particle on a plate is performed by finite element method using the commercially available software ABAQUS. In particular, the following values of the particle diameter ( dP), the particle velocity ( VP), and coating thickness ( tC) have been analyzed: 20 µm ≤ dP ≤80 µm, 80 m/s ≤ VP ≤120 m/s and 5 µm ≤ tC ≤12 µm. The results demonstrate that in erosion of gas turbine blade coating the particle velocity is 1.6 times more effective than the particle diameter and 7.3 times more effective than the coating thickness.