International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 66 (2013) 695–698

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

Technical Note

Experimental study on radiative properties of air plasma sprayed

thermal barrier coatings
G. Yang, C.Y. Zhao ⇑, B.X. Wang
School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper the radiative properties of air plasma sprayed (APS) thermal barrier coatings are investi-
Received 14 May 2013 gated by measuring the spectral normal-hemispherical reflectance and transmittance of samples with
Received in revised form 13 July 2013 various thickness and porosities in a broad spectral band ranging from 250 nm to 15 lm. The spectral
Accepted 20 July 2013
absorption and scattering coefficients are obtained by a four flux model based on the experimental data.
Available online 16 August 2013
The results show that the porous zirconia ceramics exhibits high scattering coefficient (>15,000 m1) and
low absorption coefficient (<500 m1) in the spectral range from 0.5 to 5.5 lm. Moreover, the scattering
Keywords:
coefficient increases with increasing porosity, while the spectral absorption coefficient is not quite sen-
Thermal radiation
Thermal barrier coatings
sitive to the change of porosity. In order to examine the effects of microstructure of porous zirconia coat-
Radiative properties ings, a theoretical model of Mie scattering is established, and a fairly good agreement with the
Scattering coefficient experimental data is achieved. The results indicate that the scattering coefficient heavily depends on
the microstructures of coatings, i.e., pore size, porosity and pore distribution, and this will in turn consid-
erably affect the thermal radiation heat transfer inside the coating.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The radiative properties of thermal barrier coatings are cru-
cial to properly understand the thermal radiation heat transfer,
since the most widely used coatings (composed of yttria-stabi-
lized zirconia (YSZ)) are semitransparent over a spectral region
where thermal radiation tends to be concentrated [1]. The study
on radiative transfer in such semitransparent media involves
two different aspects, one is the deriving and solving the gov-
erning equation for radiative transfer, and the other is the deter-
mination of the key radiative properties [2]. Eldridge and
Spuckler [3,4] studied the scattering and absorption coefficient
for the plasma-sprayed 8 wt% yttria-stabilized zirconia thermal
barrier coatings under room and high temperatures. Their re-
search indicated that the combined effects of absorption and
scattering show a non-exponential dependence of transmittance
on specimen thickness. Only under the conditions of sufficiently
large optical thickness, will the exponential dependence become
a good approximation. Dombrovsky et al. [5] studied the infra-
red radiative properties of porous zirconia ceramics which pos-
sess a fixed porosity of 16% by means of measurements of
normal hemispherical reflectance and transmittance in the spec-
tral range from 2.5 to 9 lm. The study showed that the
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +86 (0) 21 34204541.
E-mail address: Changying.zhao@sjtu.edu.cn (C.Y. Zhao).
scattering is closely related to the pores and cracks in the zirco-
nia ceramics which widely exist in thermal barrier coatings. Stu-
ke et al. [6,7] studied the porosity effects on scattering
coefficient of suspension and air plasma-sprayed ceramic ther-
mal barrier coating using Kubelka–Munk two flux model. How-
ever, the aforementioned research mainly concentrated on a
spectral region of 800 nm–15 lm. The radiative properties of zir-
conia ceramic coatings in the spectral range from 250 to 800 nm
are seldom mentioned. Therefore, the experimental measure-
ment in this specific band is in urgent need. On the other hand,
the variation of spectral scattering and absorption coefficients
with the porosity needs to be known, and this warrants further
experimental and theoretical research on microstructural effect
on radiative properties of thermal barrier coatings.
2. Sample preparation
In this experiment, the 8 wt% yttria-stabilized zirconia thermal
barrier coating specimens are prepared using a plasma-spray coat-
ing system equipped with 6-axis industrial robot. The substrate
material is nickel based alloy which is mainly used in manufactur-
ing the component of aero-engine. The size of substrate is
50 mm  50 mm  2 mm. The coating surface is slightly polished
in order to remove the large surface asperities which would affect
the meaningful thickness measurement. Total porosity is evaluated
by image analysis. The specification of samples is listed in Table 1.

0017-9310/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2013.07.069
696 G. Yang et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 66 (2013) 695–698

3. Experimental procedures and results

All zirconia ceramic samples are illuminated by normally inci-

dent beam. The cone angle is less than 2°. The experimental system
consists of two main parts, reflectance and transmittance subsys-
tems. The spectral directional-hemispherical reflectance and trans-
mittance of the 8YSZ freestanding coatings between 250 nm and
2.5 lm are measured using Lambda 750S UV/Vis spectrometer.
Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer (Perkin Elmer,
Frontier) with a gold-coated integrating sphere accessory (PIKE)
is used to measure the hemispherical transmittance and reflec-
tance in the infrared region between 2 lm and 15 lm, Every
measurement is repeated three times and the average value is
obtained.

3.1. Normal hemispherical reflectance and transmittance with various

thickness

The spectral hemispherical reflectance and transmittance for Fig. 1. Spectral hemispherical reflectance of freestanding 8YSZ coatings with
different thickness specimen in the spectral range from 250 nm different thickness.
to 15 lm are shown in Figs. 1 and 2, respectively. It can be seen
from the Fig. 1 that normal hemispherical reflectance increase with
the thickness of coating in the spectral range from 500 nm to
15 lm, while in the short wavelength range from 250 to 500 nm,
it exhibit an irregular change for the normal-hemispherical reflec-
tance with thickness of coatings. This result mainly caused by
strong absorption and scattering in this specific spectral range
[8]. It can be seen from Fig. 2 that the coating exhibits semi-trans-
parent feature in the spectral range from 500 nm to 8 lm.

3.2. Normal-hemispherical reflectance and transmittance with various

porosities

In order to examine the volume scattering effect, the measure-

ments for different porosities are carried out. Fig. 3 shows the
hemispherical reflectance and transmittance spectra for different
specimen porosities. It can be observed from Fig. 3 that the spectral
reflectance increases with the porosity while transmittance de-
creases with the porosity in the spectral region from 0.5 to 8 lm.
It implies that, as the porosity increases in a certain range, the scat-
tering becomes stronger. The complicated phenomena can be
attributed to the mechanism of scattering propagation inside the
coating, which mainly depends on the internal complex micro/
nano structures.
3.3. Porosity effects on the absorption and scattering coefficient
The radiative properties (spectral absorption and scattering
coefficient) can be obtained from the measured reflectance and
transmittance based on the theoretical flux model. There are three
typical models to determine the absorption and scattering coeffi-
cients including four-flux Kubelka–Munk model, two-flux Kub-
elka–Munk model as well as modified two-flux model [9–11].
Stuke et al. [6] studied the porosity effects on scattering coefficient
of air plasma sprayed coating in the spectral range from 0.3 to
2.5 lm, however, there is a lack of experimental data in the infra-
red spectral range from 2.5 to 8 lm. In this paper the four-flux
model [9] is employed to study the effect of porosity on absorption
Fig. 2. Spectral normal-hemispherical transmittance of freestanding 8YSZ coatings
with different thickness.
and scattering coefficient for a wider spectral range. The obtained
results in the translucent range ð0:25 lm < k < 8 lmÞ are shown
in Fig. 4. It can be observed that the scattering coefficient increases
with the porosity in the spectral region from 0.5 to 8 lm. In the
meanwhile, the absorption in this translucent range is directly pro-
portional to the mass of the material. To elucidate the change of
absorption coefficient, a zoomed-in version between 5.4 and
6 lm is shown in Fig. 4.
4. Theoretical considerations of the spectral scattering inside
the coatings
Due to the thermal spraying process, various types of pores will
exist in coatings, such as void, delamination, and cracks, and their
difference lies mostly in their aspect ratio [12]. In order to simplify

Table 1
Thermal barrier coating samples investigated.

Sample Name
A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7 A8 A9 A10
Thickness (lm) 50 ± 2 100 ± 3 150 ± 5 200 ± 7 300 ± 8 400 ± 9 500 ± 11 200 ± 7 200 ± 7 200 ± 7
Porosity % 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 15 ± 1 5±1 15 ± 1 25 ± 1
 G. Yang et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 66 (2013) 695–698 697

Fig. 4. Effect of porosity on radiative properties of air plasma sprayed thermal

barrier coating scattering coefficient (b) absorption coefficient.
Fig. 3. Effect of porosity on normal-hemispherical reflectance and transmittance of
freestandingcoatings (a) Normal-hemispherical reflectance (b) Normal-hemispher-
ical transmittance.

the complicated microstructure of coatings, we do not distinguish

among them in morphology, and all of them are collectively trea-
ted as spherical pores. Hence, the scattering coefficient of porous
zirconia coatings can be predicted using the classical Mie theory.
The transport scattering coefficient of porous zirconia ceramics
can be calculated as follows [13].

R1
Q tr r 2 FðrÞda
rtr ¼ 0:75  p  0R 1 s 3 ð1Þ
0
r FðrÞda

where p is the porosity, F(r) is the size distribution of the pores. In

this case, the logarithmic normal distribution is assumed.
It can be seen from Fig. 5 that the agreement between the pred-
icated value and the experimental data is fairly good for the case of
low porosity. This result confirms that the scattering inside the zir-
conia coatings can be treated as independent scattering by pores
on the condition of a low porosity. Therefore, the scattering coeffi-
cient is closely related to the pore size and pore distribution. Addi-
tionally, and the average pore diameter for the samples with a
porosity of 5% can be estimated as about 0.2 lm based on the
experimental data.
Fig. 5. Comparison of model calculations using Mie theory with experimental data
for the scattering coefficient.
5. Conclusions
In this paper the scattering and absorption coefficient of 8YSZ
coatings are experimentally and theoretically investigated in a
broad spectral region from 250 nm to 15 lm. The results indicate
that the porous 8YSZ coatings exhibit stronger scattering and weak
698 G. Yang et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 66 (2013) 695–698
absorption in the spectral region from 0.5 to 6 lm. In a certain
range of porosity, scattering coefficient increases with the porosity
in the spectral region between 0.5 and 8 lm. The scattering effect
is closely related to the internal microstructure of the coating, such
as pores, crack, and the effect of porosity on spectral absorption
coefficient is mainly determined by the nature of material’s prop-
erties. In fact, the volume scattering inside the coatings is a very
complicated subject [14], and it still remains an open question
and requires further research.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (No: 51176110) and the National Basic Research Pro-
gramme of China (973 Project: 2013CB228303).
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