The Maeslant storm surge barrier in the Netherlands is an interesting case in system reliability, first because of the great effort that has been put into making its operation reliable and into assessing its reliability, and second, because it has characteristics that make reliability assessment extremely hard. From its history a number of interesting conclusions can be drawn, of which the most...

Observations of the cosmological large-scale structure provide wellestablished neutrino mass limits. We extend this argument to thermal relic axions. We calculate the axion thermal freeze-out temperature and thus their cosmological abundance on the basis of their interaction with pions. For hadronic axions we find a new mass limit ma < 1.05 eV (95% CL), corresponding to a limit on the axion dec...

When tailored to make durable thermal barrier coatings (TBCs), the Solution Precursor Plasma Spray (SPPS) process produces a microstructure containing uniformly vertical cracks. These cracks provide a high degree of strain tolerance to the ceramic top coat. In order to understand the formation of vertical crack in SPPS process, coatings of various thicknesses were deposited on a variety of subs...

In this paper a functional graded material (FGM) thermal barrier coating (TBC) is prepared using Atmospheric Plasma Spraying (APS) method. The FGM layers were deposited by varying the feeding ratio of CYSZ/NiCrAlY and conventional CYSZ on a NiCrALY-coated Inconel 738 substrates. Hot corrosion behavior, bonding strength and the related failure mechanisms of a conventional TBC and a FGM TBC are i...

Ceramic thermal barrier coatings are commonly used in gas turbine hot components (e.g., combustor liners/buckets and guide vane platforms). In components that are only partially coated or have cooling-air outlets, coating-end stress singularities may lead to the spallation of the coating. Depending on the geometry of the transition from coated to uncoated material, the severity of the stress si...

Modern gas turbine hot sections need to be protected from elevated temperature and damaging environments. This protection starts as a typically two layer coating system, the base layer or bond coat (BC) acts as a corrosion barrier and a kind of buffer for the thermal mismatch between the base material and the second top thermally protective layer or Thermal Barrier Coating (TBC). The BC is norm...

The conductivity of a thermal-barrier coating composed of atmospheric plasma sprayed 8 mass percent yttria partially stabilized zirconia has been measured. This coating was sprayed on a substrate of 410 stainless steel. An absolute, steady-state measurement method was used to measure thermal conductivity from 400 to 800 K. The thermal conductivity of the coating is 0.62 W/(m⋅K). This measuremen...

This paper presents low cycle fatigue (LCF) life prediction of a coated and uncoated exhaust manifolds. First Solidworks software was used to model the exhaust manifolds. A thermal barrier coating system was applied on the tubes c of the exhaust manifolds, consists of two-layer systems: a ceramic top coat (TC), made of yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ), ZrO2-8%Y2O3 and also a metallic bond coat ...