Influence of thermodynamic activities of different masteralloys in pack powder mixtures to produce low activity aluminide coatings on TiAl alloys

• A designed pack cementation coating is used to form a protective layer on TiAl.
• For protection of TiAl the Al-content and phases of a coating are crucial.
• The impact of activity of the masteralloy on resulting phases is investigated.
• Gradient of activity masteralloy-powder to substrate is key to coating structure.
• This process design allows manufacturing a coating with an optimized Al-content.

Titanium aluminides are interesting high temperature materials, but show insufficient oxidation resistance as well as embrittlement at higher temperatures (>750 °C). Al-enriched coatings can be manufactured by pack cementation on many high temperature alloys to promote the formation of a protective alumina layer at high temperatures, which not only protects the alloy from oxidation but is also expected to impede embrittlement of TiAl at high temperatures. One drawback of such coatings is that Al-rich phases are very brittle. Therefore the major intermetallic aluminide phase in the coating plays a critical role for the protection behavior. Based on thermodynamic calculations different masteralloys were chosen to control the pack cementation process. Particular attention is given to the gradient between the aluminum activity of the different masteralloy powders and the aluminum activity of the substrate surface (alloy TNM®-B1) in order to control the deposited phase at the surface. It is revealed that powder pack with Al as masteralloy provides a high Al activity and produces thick multi-layered coatings consisting of brittle TiAl3 and TiAl2 phase and aluminum-rich TiAl. By using different chromium aluminides as masteralloys, thinner, low-activity coatings could be produced, consisting of a bi-layer of brittle TiAl2 phase and aluminum-rich TiAl or just the targeted pure aluminum-rich TiAl, which is known to have much better mechanical properties.