Reciprocating wear properties of thermal sprayed titanium aluminide–alumina composite coatings

Reciprocating wear properties of a metallic TiAl coating and various TiAl/Al2O3 based composite coatings were investigated under ambient conditions. The coatings were deposited onto a Ti–6Al–4V substrate using Plasma and HVOF thermal spraying techniques. Results show that the HVOF sprayed coatings are more wear resistant than the Plasma sprayed coatings. The TiAl/Al2O3 composite coatings were observed to improve the wear properties of the substrate, while the wear performance of the TiAl coating was observed to be worse than that of the substrate. The addition of 1 wt.% nano-particle yttria (Y2O3) to the base feedstock powder TiAl/Al2O3 was found to have improved the wear properties of the resulted coating.