New Environmental-Thermal Barrier Coatings for Ultrahigh Temperature Alloys

Default ARPA-E Project Image

Program:
ULTIMATE
Award:
$600,000
Location:
College Park, Maryland
Status:
ALUMNI
Project Term:
04/23/2021 - 03/31/2023
Website:

Technology Description:

The University of Maryland will leverage a newly invented, ultrafast high-temperature sintering (UHS) method to perform fast exploration of new environmental-thermal barrier coatings (ETBCs) for 1300°C-capable refractory alloys for harsh turbine environments. UHS enables ultrafast synthesis of high-melting oxide coatings, including multilayers, in less than a minute, enabling rapid evaluation of novel coating compositions. By using UHS with fast-fail tests and modeling and analytics tools, the team will be able to explore hundreds of compositions and coating architectures to design and optimize 1700°C-capable ETBCs with different layer sequences, thicknesses, porosity levels, and novel compositions. Hundreds of ETBCs will be fabricated on refractory alloy substrates and tested for thermal conductivity, thermal stability, resistance to thermal cycling, and other properties. The 1700°C-capable ETBCs on the 1300°C-capable alloys could improve the efficiency of natural gas turbines and jet engines by 7% and provide a combined primary energy saving of 18-20 quads of energy by 2050.

Potential Impact:

Combining development of new ultrahigh temperature materials with compatible coatings and manufacturing technologies has the potential to increase gas turbine efficiency up to 7%, which will significantly reduce wasted energy and carbon emissions.

Security:

Coal-fired and nuclear-powered plant electricity generation is uneconomical, unsafe, outdated, and/or contributes to significant CO2 emissions. Increasing gas turbine efficiency is critical to ensuring that plants can effectively deploy their capacity to the grid, increasing energy security.

Environment:

Improving gas turbine efficiency can significantly reduce carbon emissions from air travel, which represents 2% of all global carbon emissions.

Economy:

By 2050, a 7% efficiency improvement in the natural gas turbines used for U.S. electricity generation could save up to 15-16 quads of energy; in civilian aircraft turbines, 3-4 quads of energy could be saved for U.S. air travel.

Contact

ARPA-E Program Director:
Dr. Philseok Kim
Project Contact:
Prof. Ji-Cheng Zhao
Press and General Inquiries Email:
ARPA-E-Comms@hq.doe.gov
Project Contact Email:
jczhao@umd.edu

Partners

HighT-Tech
Harvard University

Related Projects

• General Electric (GE) Global Research - ULTIMATE Refractory Alloy Innovations for Superior Efficiency (RAISE)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Additive Manufacturing of Oxidation-Resistant Gradient Refractory Composites
• National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) - Rapid Design and Manufacturing of High-Performance Materials for Turbine Blades Applications above 1300°Celsius
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) - Facility for Evaluating High Temperature Oxidation and Mechanical Properties
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) - Development of Niobium-Based Alloys for Turbine Applications
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) - Selective Thermal Emission Coatings for Improved Turbine Performance
• Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) - Design and Manufacturing of Ultrahigh Temperature Refractory Alloys
• QuesTek Innovations - Concurrent Design of a Multimaterial Niobium Alloy System for Next-generation Turbine Applications
• Raytheon Technologies Research Center - Computationally Guided ODS Refractory HEAs via Additive Manufacturing
• Raytheon Technologies Research Center - Environmental Protection Coating System for Refractory Metal Alloys (EPCS for RMAs)
• Texas A&M University - Batch-wise Improvement in Reduced Design Space using a Holistic Optimization Technique (BIRDSHOT)
• The Boeing Company - Ultra-High Performance Metallic Turbine Blades for Extreme Environments
• University of Maryland (UMD) - New Environmental-Thermal Barrier Coatings for Ultrahigh Temperature Alloys
• University of Utah - Designing Novel Multicomponent Niobium Alloys for High Temperature: Integrated Design, Rapid Processing & Validation Approach
• University of Virginia (UVA) - High Entropy Rare-earth Oxide (HERO) Coatings for Refractory Alloys
• University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) - Additive Manufacturing of Ultrahigh Temperature Refractory Metal Alloys
• West Virginia University - High-Throughput Computational Guided Development of Refractory Complex Concentrated Alloys-based Composite

Release Date:
04/21/2020