A software tool to design thermal barrier coatings: a technical note

This paper summarizes work completed for a NASA Phase ISBIR program that demonstrated the feasi-bility of developing a software tool to aid in the design of thermal barrier coating (TBC) systems. Toward this goal, three tasks were undertaken and completed. Task 1 involved the development of a database con-taining the pertinent thermal and mechanical property data for the top coat, bond coat, and substrate materials that constitute a TBC system. Task 2 involved the development of an automated setup program for generating two-dimensional finite-element analysis (FEA) models of TBC systems. Most importantly, task 3 involved the generation of a rule base to aid in the design of a TBC system. These rules were based on a factorial design of experiments involving FEA results and were generated using a Yates analysis. A previous study had indicated the suitability and benefit of applying FEA to perform computer-based ex-periments to decrease but not eliminate physical experiments on TBCs. This program expanded on these findings by developing a larger knowledge base and a procedure to extract rules to aid in the TBC design.