Turbine blade cooling and thermal barrier coatings

Internal air cooling above the melting point of the alloy; zirconium oxide TBCs as the only ceramic matching the CTE of nickel; $5,000-per-blade cost driven by EB vapor deposition.

Then they went to cooling. [Tom holds up a turbine blade with internal cooling passages.] It's got internal cooling passages. If you take some of the other courses, I'll talk more about how they make that. They went to internal cooling, and the interesting thing here is you see this jump in temperature — about 1,300 degrees centigrade. That's above the melting point of the material. If you didn't have that cooling, your engine would melt. The cooling is actually thousand-degree Fahrenheit air that comes from the compressor. As long as the turbine is running, you always have cooling air — unless something gets plugged up.