MUMBAI, India, July 13 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202641083540 A) filed by Vinodh S on July 07, 2026, for Dual-Function Friction-Surfaced High-Entropy Alloy Coating For Corrosion And Cavitation-Erosion Resistant Protection Of Tidal And Offshore Turbine Components.
Inventors include Dr S Vinodh; Dr Anand M Raikar; Dr A Senthamilselvi; M Clement; Sathish Radhakrishnan; and Dr N S Sivakumar.
The application for the patent was published on July 10, 2026, under issue no. 28/2026.
Abstract: The present invention relates to a friction-surfaced, high-entropy alloy (HEA) coating system for tidal turbine and offshore wind turbine components, compositionally engineered to provide corrosion resistance and cavitation-erosion resistance simultaneously through a single coating chemistry, rather than optimizing the coating for only one of these two degradation modes as is typical of existing marine protective coatings. Components such as tidal turbine blades, rotor hubs, offshore monopile splash-zone regions, shaft seals, and cavitation-prone pump and valve surfaces are subjected concurrently to electrochemical corrosion from chloride-rich seawater and to mechanical cavitation-erosion damage arising from hydrodynamic micro-bubble collapse, yet conventional coatings — including single-element passive-film coatings and fusion-deposited hard-facing coatings — are typically formulated to resist one of these degradation mechanisms at the expense of the other. The proposed coating is deposited by friction surfacing (FS), a solid-state cladding process in which a rotating consumable high-entropy alloy rod is frictionally deposited onto the substrate below the melting point of the alloy, avoiding the substrate dilution, heat-affected-zone (HAZ) softening, and porosity commonly associated with fusion- based deposition routes such as laser cladding, arc cladding, or thermal spraying. The HEA composition is a Cr- and Al-containing multi-principal-element alloy (e.g., an AlCoCrFeNiCu-type system) selected so that Cr and Al preferentially form a stable, adherent passive oxide film (Cr2O3/Al2O3-rich) in seawater, while the same multi-principal-element lattice simultaneously exhibits severe lattice distortion, sluggish diffusion, and a high configurational-entropy solid-solution structure that raises hardness and resistance to plastic deformation under repetitive cavitation micro-jet impact. The dual-function performance of the coating is quantifiable through combined electrochemical and mechanical-erosion characterization: potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) are used to establish corrosion current density (icorr), corrosion potential (Ecorr), and charge-transfer resistance (Rct), while ultrasonic cavitation erosion testing establishes cumulative mass loss and incubation period. By engineering a single friction-surfaced HEA layer to simultaneously satisfy both electrochemical passivation and mechanical erosion-resistance criteria, the invention provides extended service life, reduced maintenance frequency, and improved reliability for tidal and offshore wind turbine components operating under combined corrosion-cavitation loading, in contrast to existing coatings that address either corrosion or cavitation-erosion resistance in isolation.
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
