Abstract
The increasing trend of turbocharger applications leads to progressive research on the use of thermal barrier coating to improve engine performance. Ceramic materials such as zirconia, silicon nitride and silicon carbide are widely used as thermal barrier coating in high temperature components of turbocharged internal combustion engine. Ceramic coated turbine rotors and rolling element bearing have shown good improvement on the engine performance where the ceramic provides good insulation and protect the components from hot corrosion. Turbine volute is one of the major components in a turbocharger, which is exposed to very high temperature exhaust gasses. The commonly used material for the volute is tungsten, which is heavy and costly and it has poor insulation, thus resulting is significant heat loss to the environment. In order to mitigate these problems, a new material and application of ceramic coating could be adopted for the turbine volute. The new material with ceramic coating should be economical and light weighted in order to increase the thermal efficiency and reduce the heat loss to ambient. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to review several types of ceramic materials to be coated to the turbine volute based on their characteristics, latest development and research trends. It is hoped that this paper will serve as a useful guide in selecting the suitable ceramic material to be used as coating in the turbine volute of a turbocharged internal combustion engine.
