Basic understanding of materials synthesis by thermal plasmas

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Thermal spraying is a multi billion dollars activity in North-America.  Most of the issues with thermal spraying are to provide to existing materials a localized benefit in terms of higher hardness, superior heat, corrosion resistance, wear or sliding performance.  As thermal spraying research and development is progressing, then the applications evolved historically from the aerospace industry to the mining, pulp and paper, chemical industries and others and also to less visible orthopaedic and dental applications.           All the coatings have to be engineered to survive to a very hostile environment and need always to be improved to save weight, costs and to decrease the maintenance costs.  As the substrate materials quality are progressing with the research invested by the aerospace and automotive industry, so must also the coating being further developed.   New compositions and new microstuctures or nanostructures are thus needed by the industry and especially when considering technical ceramic materials, usually compositions include 2 to 3 elements at the maximum, because those materials are difficult to process by traditional processing methods.  Recently NASA developed a new class of thermal barrier coatings which exhibit half the thermal conductivity of the state of the art materials.  This development was possible through the use of a patented four elements ceramic composition associated to a nanostructure which can simply replace the todays materials with almost half of the materials cost and half of the weight and the application time.         The proposed research addresses the problematic of new coating materials synthesis and discovery (especially ceramic based) by developing the process of combinatorial inorganic chemistry applied to thermal spraying.  There is the need for this research as it will be able, in the future, to help our industry to have access to innovative coating materials which will make our products more competitive on the international market.