Abstract
Experimental work has been undertaken to investigate the importance of the temperature of the substrate during deposition on the coating-adhesion of plasma sprayed borosilicate glass coatings. The work shows that the measured adhesion increases markedly with substrate temperature up to 400°C above which no further major increase takes place. Heat transfer and fluid mechanics calculations predict that the effect of substrate temperature is due to its influence through the cooling rate on the viscosity and flow of the molten glass particles as they impact on the substrate surface. The theoretical calculations also predict large temperature gradients through the thickness of the splats and glass coatings, and the consequent non-uniform thermal stress distributions are expected to contribute to the reduced splat retention rate and coating-adhesion at low substrate temperatures. The predictions were confirmed by an electron microscopy examination of the morphology of isolated splats, the deposits and the coating-substrate interface.
