Modeling failures of thermal barrier coatings

Thermal barrier coatings are commonly used in high temperature parts of gas turbines, to protect the underlying metal substrate from deterioration during high temperature exposure. Unfortunately, the coatings fail prematurely, preventing the design engineers to fully utilize their implementation. Due to the complexity of the coatings, there are many challenges involved with developing failure hypotheses for the failures. This paper reviews some aspects of the current state-of-the-art on modeling failures of thermal barrier coatings, focusing on mechanics based models (such as finite element simulations) where the material physics is incorporated (such as oxidation and diffusion).