This overview highlights some of the key factors in understanding the protective ability of aluminum oxide scales for current gas turbine engine alloys and coatings. Dense, phase-pure, slow-growing and adherent scales are required. In most cases, solutions have been found through educated empiricism, with more complete understanding often lagging by decades. Nevertheless, the relentless application of new techniques to answer old questions has often provided radically different viewpoints and pointed the way to new engineering developments. Equally important, this understanding prevents prior misconceptions from taking too strong a hold and maintaining a limited perspective. The microstructure, kinetics, shortcircuit diffusion, phase transformation, growth and residual stresses, interfacial segregation and adhesion provide a richness of topics for this singular and effective system. Copyright
INTRODUCTIONThe successful application of many materials requires excellent high-temperature properties. For example, the thermal materials used in electric furnaces, waste incinerators, boilers, heat exchangers and heat engines all require long-term mechanical and chemical stability at high temperatures. The surface stability of the candidate material is necessary to prevent rapid material consumption at high temperatures. In general, this dictates that the exposed material is able to form a slow-growing, stable, adherent surface scale that serves to protect the underlying substrate material. The most important and effective scales are oxides; they are easily produced by reaction with the oxygen in air or in other oxygen-containing H 2 O, CO 2 or CO gaseous environments. And the most sought-after oxide scales are Al 2 O 3 , Cr 2 O 3 , and SiO 2 because of their outstanding protective qualities. Many of the high-temperature components used in aircraft and ground power gas turbines rely on these scales for protection.The purpose of the present review is to highlight some of the recent advances that have been made to high-temperature, oxidation-resistant turbine materials. It is intended to be neither comprehensive nor critical, but rather to give a general, albeit parochial, synopsis of a number of key issues seen to rise to prominence from the perspective of this author. In light of this venue, an attempt will be made to give special emphasis to advances in understanding and performance that were associated with and facilitated by various characterization and surface analysis techniques.
Oxidation primerA few points regarding the basic tenents of oxidation theory relevant to all systems are worth reviewing before dealing with specific issues. (The cardinal reference text on the subject, elegantly covering all aspects in great detail, is that by Kofstad. 1 ) Very briefly, the pertinent control issues are the thermodynamics of the possible gas-solid reactions and the diffusion rates of the oxide scales in the presence of a large oxygen activity (P O 2 ) gradient. The free energy of formation of binary oxides ranges from abou...