Near‐Infrared Trapping by Surface Plasmons in Randomized Platinum–Ceramic Metamaterial for Thermal Barrier Coatings

Abstract As the operation temperature of next generation gas turbine is targeted to be 1800 °C toward a higher efficiency and lower carbon emission, the near‐infrared (NIR) thermal radiation becomes a major concern for the durability of the metallic turbine blades. Although thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are applied to provide thermal insulations, they are translucent to the NIR radiation. It is a major challenge for TBCs to achieve optically thick with limited physical thickness (usually < 1 mm) for effectively shielding the NIR radiation damage. Here, an NIR metamaterial is reported, where a Gd 2 Zr 2 O 7 ceramic matrix is randomly dispersed with microscale Pt (0.53 vol%) nanoparticles with a size of 100–500 nm. Attenuated by the Gd 2 Zr 2 O 7 matrix, a broadband NIR extinction is achieved through the red‐shifted plasmon resonance frequencies and higher‐order multipole resonances of the Pt nanoparticles. A very high absorption coefficient of ≈3 × 10 4 m −1 , approaching the Rosseland diffusion limit for a typical coating thickness, minimizes the radiative thermal conductivity to ≈10 −2 W m −1 K −1 and successfully shields the radiative heat transfer. This work suggests that constructing a conductor/ceramic metamaterial with tunable plasmonics could be a strategy to shield NIR thermal radiation for high temperature applications.