Residual stress distribution along interfaces in thermal barrier coating system under thermal cycles

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The residual interfacial stress plays an important role in crack initiating and propagating along the interface, which could result in delamination failure of the thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). In this study, the finite element model of air plasma spraying(APS) TBCs was established to assess the level and distribution of residual stress along top coat(TC)/thermally grown oxide (TGO) and bond coat (BC)/TGO interfaces under thermal cycles. Instead of using vertical stress S22 in global coordinate system, the normal and tangential components in the local system along the interfaces, transformed from stress components S11, S22, and S12 in the global one, were used to evaluate the way the cracks initiate and propagate along the interfaces. Firstly, the effect of the number of thermal cycles on residual stress was investigated. It was found that, for the TBCs model without TGO growth and crack, the impact of the number of thermal cycles on the stress is very insignificant and could be ignored. So the present study only chose to focus on the first thermal cycle. Then the influence of the TGO thickness and the interface amplitude on the normal and tangential residual stresses for both homogeneous and inhomogeneous temperature fields was explored. The results show that the TGO thickness, interface amplitude and temperature field affect the residual stress level and distribution, leading to different fracture mechanisms along TC/TGO and TGO/BC interfaces. Finally, the difference between the vertical stress in the global coordinate system and the normal stress in the local coordinate system was studied. Compared with vertical stress S22, the stress components normal and tangential to the TC/TGO and TGO/BC interfaces are more appropriate to describing the stress distribution along the interfaces and predicting the propensity of crack initiating and propagating along the interfaces.