| Summary: | Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are a simple and proven method to protect hot section components. Suspension Plasma Spray (SPS), an emerging process technology to generate TBCs, compared with traditional Atmospheric Plasma Spray APS, can deposit thinner coat-ings with finer microstructure. Operating parameters play an important role in developing certain properties of coating. In this thesis work, power level, gas flow rate, number of spray-ing strokes, spray gun's nozzle size i.e. internal diameter and suspension rate were controlled to produce coatings with different microstructures and porosity levels. According to the ex-perimental results, the power level of plasma gun play an essential role on coating micro-structure, for instance, the density of vertical cracks increased with growing the power level. The number of spraying strokes showed also an impact on coating porosity. However, due to different nozzle sizes i.e. diameter, the same coating property were controlled by different operating parameters. For coatings deposited by small and large nozzles, their coating thick-ness and roughness mainly relied on power level and gas flow rate. In contrary, it seems that the coating roughness was not influenced by the same parameters when it was deposited by medium nozzle. Also, gas flow rate do not have as big as influence on coating thickness
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