The presence of defects such as voids, inter-lamellar porosities or cracks, provides a decrease of the effective thermal conductivity of plasma sprayed coatings as well as a decrease of the corresponding mechanical properties such as the Young’s modulus. In general, effective properties of thermal spray coatings are thus strongly different from that of the bulk material and have thus to be quantified to validate their in service performances. A complementary approach allowing understanding the relationships between the microstructure of a coating and its macro-properties is the use of Finite Element Modeling. The case of composite coatings is still more complicated due to the presence of different materials. In the present study, thermo-mechanical properties of a plasma sprayed composite coating were estimated by numerical modeling based on FEM. The applied method uses directly cross-sectional micrographs without simplification using a one-cell per pixel approach. Characteristics such as the thermal conductivity, the Young’s modulus, the Poisson ratio and the dilatation coefficient were considered. The selected example was an AlSi/polyester coating used as abradable seal in the aerospace industry.

In this study, ethylene methacrylic acid copolymer (EMAA) was used as the matrix to produce EMAA/Al2O3 and EMAA/NiCr composite coatings from dry-blended powder mixtures. This work was conducted to determine processing concerns when using similar sized reinforcement particles of different density in a flame-spray process. This work has utility for applications that require a reduction in mechanical wear and/or to confer upon a polymeric deposit a certain functional property by the introduction of value-added powder. Free-standing coatings were produced to test the mechanical properties of the sprayed deposit. The effects of the filler content on the secant modulus, yield stress, and tensile strength are discussed. The differences in deposition efficiencies among the EMAA, Al2O3, and NiCr are highlighted with respect to particle size and density.