Yttria-stabilized ZrO₂ powders with initial sizes of 5–22 mm were chsosen as feedstock for hybrid thermal plasma deposition. At 100 kW RF input power, the microstructures of the deposited coatings varied from mostly sprayed splats to physical-vapor-deposited nanostructures when the powder feeding rate was reduced from 4 to 1 g/min. At a powder feeding rate of 2 g/min, a peculiar layered coating consisting of both structures was deposited at a rate over 50 mm/min, which is promising for the fabrication of next-generation novel thermal barrier coatings.

In this paper, a new type of molecular tagging velocimetry based on NH fluorescence was developed and validated for the velocity measurements of a high-enthalpy rarefied gas wind tunnel where the maximum flow velocity exceeds 6 km/s near the nozzle exit at 0.2 Pa. The feasibility of this technique using the short-lived NH fluorescence was demonstrated in the hypersonic rarefied gas flow with yielding velocity profiles at multiple downstream locations from the nozzle exit. The total uncertainty of the measured flow velocities was estimated to be less than 6% when the flow velocity is above 2000 m/s. For the new tagging technique, only a single laser and a single time-gated camera are required for velocity measurement, due to the existence of NH radicals in the arc-discharged N₂ mixed with a small amount of H₂. Therefore, the NH-MTV not only shows great promise for tagging in high-enthalpy rarefied gas of nitrogen or air flows without seeding, but also possesses high practicability and facility for velocity measurement.

The low-temperature nonequilibrium characteristics of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) make it an important candidate for the decomposition and conversion of CO₂. In this study, quartz, alumina and zirconia are selected as the dielectrics to investigate the effect of dielectric materials of planar DBD reactor on the discharge and conversion characteristics of CO₂. It is shown that under the same input power conditions, zirconia has the highest CO₂ conversion rate when used as a dielectric, followed by alumina, and quartz has the lowest. Combined with the analysis of the measured electrical characteristics, it is shown that zirconia has the highest transferred charge, thus further increasing the discharge efficiency. Experimental results of the single dielectric barrier layer-metal mesh electrode reactor show that the CO₂ discharge can operate in the lower power range and the CO₂ conversion rate is higher than that of the double dielectric barrier layer reactor. Spectroscopic measurements show that the emission intensity of the discharge in the reactor with high relative permittivity materials is higher than that in the case of low relative permittivity materials, and the emission intensity of the single dielectric layer reactor is also higher than that in the case of the double dielectric layer reactor.