The growth of data generated within thermal spraying is, for many, a daunting business. Yet, this growing resource represents a largely untapped and potentially valuable asset capable of providing “knowledge” rather than just “information”. Many companies already use a range of Web based tools. However, the Web itself is changing and the vision for the future, the “Semantic Web”, is set to revolutionise how business will be done. One important aspect of this Web “future” is that web pages will be greatly enriched and data will have additional information (tags) which help to describe it and more significantly, put the data into a context. This will enable machine readability and the use of query languages to ask direct questions. Following on from ideas introduced at ITSC 2007, a proof of concept demonstrator has been built for thermal spray coatings used in the Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) of gas turbines. A system has been built which stores and manipulates a range of data including; aircraft deliveries, RSS feeds of aircraft sales, engine types, MRO business details, thermal spray coatings and market dynamics. This paper presents the development of this system and discusses its future potential.

There are many instances of coatings that require a nondestructive and non-contact measure of coating thickness as part of a quality control system. Specifically, this paper reports on experiments carried out on non-contact measurements of MCrAlY and TBC coatings. The system uses an infrared beam from a solid state laser to generate a thermal wave in the coating. When this wave reaches the substrate an interference effect is caused. The modulated input heating produces a modulated output infrared signal from the surface and at a different wavelength from the laser beam. The output signal has a phase difference from the input signal which is related to the coating thickness. As neither the laser nor the detector are in contact with the surface of the coating and the temperature of the coating is raised by only a few degrees this represents a non-contact NDE system. This system has been tested across a range of coating/substrate combinations. In this paper we give examples of MCrAlY and TBC coatings applied to engine components demonstrating that the accuracy of measurement is only limited by the roughness of the coating structure and substrate. The use of this system for on-line measurement during the spraying process is also discussed and results presented.