Supervisors: Distinguished Professor Chris Berndt (Swinburne ), Professor Ravi S Kottada and Professor B.S. Murty (Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India)

Thesis title: Exploring High Entropy Alloys for Bond Coat Applications

Thesis synopsis: High entropy alloys (HEAs) are a recently developed category of materials which are based on multiple principal elements, unlike single-element based conventional alloys. Several alloy compositions have been reported to exhibit excellent chemical and mechanical properties in HEA literature. There is potential to translate these advantageous properties to surface engineering, as thermal sprayed HEA coatings. One prospective application is as high temperature oxidation resistant bond coats, employed as a part of thermal barrier coatings for turbine blades in jet engines. The concept of this thesis is to explore the materials hyperspace offered by HEAs for novel compositions that can match or outperform traditional bond coat materials such as MCrAlY and aluminides. To this end, members of the Al-Cr-Fe-Co-Ni family of HEAs have been investigated for their phase formation and oxidation properties in the bulk form. Selected best performing alloys have further been studied as thermal sprayed coatings as a part of an HEA-based thermal barrier coating.

Ameey Anupam is a joint PhD Candidate with Swinburne University of Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, she is also a Research Fellow with SEAM. Ameey completed her Bachelors of Technology with Honours in metallurgical and materials engineering from the National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur, India. Her research is focussed on developing thermal sprayed high entropy alloy coatings for high temperature applications and decoding the science governing them.