Surface engineering of advanced composite coatings for significant enhancement to the life cycle of HydroPower infrastructure

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In hydropower plants like any other plants, part failures normally contribute to high maintenance and repair costs; revenue lost due to downtime and cost of replacement power; decreased operating efficiencies; and reduction of equipment service life. There are several avenues to minimize the effect of abrasive flows in hydraulic systems, namely i. improved flow profile design, ii. surface treatment of exposed materials to increase erosion resistance, and iii. application of erosion-resistant coatings. In this NSERC-Strategic project we propose to i) manufacture two generations of self-lubricating composite coatings on SS444/SS309 substrate, ii) quantify their corrosion properties, iii) study their tribology properties, and iv) develop predictive corrosion models that will aid Hydro Quebec (HQ) in their technology development. Our material development will focus on the use of thermal spray, which is one of the most used coating technologies with applications in different industrial sectors such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical, energy and environment. The technology is versatile as metals, ceramics, polymers and their composites can be sprayed to produce high-performance coatings/films. Thermal spray coatings are presently widely used to either improve service life of industrial parts or repair the failed parts of complex and expensive systems, which are directly targeted by our industrial partner. A spectrum of engineered coatings will be developed to address severe service conditions with multiple degradation mechanisms such as combined erosion/corrosion as faced in hydro turbine engines. A key strength of our concerted effort is the systematic characterization of the materials through electrochemical and tribology testing and subsequent numerical modeling that can define predictive metrics for the subsequent design of later materials generations.