Basic understanding of materials synthesis by thermal plasmas

热喷涂在北美是一项耗资数十亿美元的活动。热喷涂的大多数问题都是为了在更高的硬度、更好的耐热性、耐腐蚀性、磨损或滑动性能方面为现有材料提供局部好处。随着热喷涂研究和开发的进展，应用历史上从航空航天工业演变到采矿、纸浆和造纸、化学工业和其他行业，也演变到不太明显的矫形和牙科应用。他们说，所有涂层都必须经过设计才能在非常恶劣的环境中生存，并且需要不断改进以减轻重量。成本和降低维护成本。随着基材质量随着航空航天和汽车工业的研究投入而不断提高，涂层也必须进一步开发。因此，行业需要新的组合物和新的微结构或纳米结构，特别是在考虑技术陶瓷材料时，组合物通常最多包括2到3个元素，因为这些材料很难通过传统的加工方法进行加工。最近，NASA开发了一种新型热障涂层，其导热系数是最先进材料的一半。通过使用与纳米结构相关联的专利四元素陶瓷成分，可以简单地用几乎一半的材料成本和一半的重量和应用时间来取代今天的材料。他说，拟议的研究通过开发组合无机化学应用于热喷涂的过程来解决新涂层材料(特别是陶瓷基)合成和发现的问题。这项研究是必要的，因为它将能够在未来帮助我们的行业获得创新的涂层材料，使我们的产品在国际市场上更具竞争力。

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.