Behavior of thermal barrier coatings for advanced gas turbine blades

The work reported herein deals with a plasma-sprayed zirconia-yttria ceramic coating with a nickel-chromium-aluminum bond coat on a super- alloy substrate. This investigation has as its principal objective the quantitative determination of stress states in a model thermal barrier coating as it cools in air. The effects associated with an idealized rough ceramic-bond interface were investigated. The influence of bond coat oxidation was also determined, together with the impact of initial cracking within the coating. An improved understanding of these coating behaviors is expected to lead to the discovery of coating failure mechanisms which can greatly benefit the designer.In this investigation the powerful finite element method was employed to model the coating which is assumed to be elastic for this initial effort. To obtain the necessary accuracy a very fine finite element grid was developed, utilizing generalized plane-strain elements to model a cylindrical coated specimen. The model which is named TBCOC contains 1316 nodal points and 2140 elements.Using a generic code called MARC, numerical results were obtained from this model. The actual calculations were performed on a CRAY-1S supercomputer. Detailed stress distributions in the coating were obtained to reflect the effects of thermal expansion mismatch and the material properties. Results to date have pinpointed the existence (and location) of large radial tensile stresses in the ceramic layer adjacent to the rough ceramic- bond interface.The effects of oxidation on the stresses are shown together with the influence of initial cracking at specific locations near the ceramic-bond interface. A preliminary failure mechanism for thermal barrier coatings is proposed on the basis of these numerical results and published experimental work.