Thermal barrier coating(TBC)systems are widely used in industrial gas-turbine engines.However,premature failures have impaired the use of TBCs and cut down their lifetime,which requires a better understanding of their failure mechanisms.In the present study,experimental studies of isothermal cycling are firstly carried out with the observation and estimation of microstructures.According to the experimental results,a finite element model is established for the analysis of stress perpendicular to the TBC/BC interface.Detailed residual stress distributions in TBC are obtained to reflect the influence of mechanical properties,oxidation,and interfacial roughness.The calculated results show that the maximum tensile stress concentration appears at the peak of TBC and continues to increase with thermal cycles.Because of the microstructural characteristics of plasma-sprayed TBCs,cracks initialize in tensile stress concentration(TSC)regions at the peaks of TBC and propagate along the TBC/BC interface resulting in the spallation of TBC.Also,the inclusion of creep is crucial to failure prediction and is more important than the inclusion of sintering in the simulation.
In this study, the residual strain of a thin conductive metal wire on a polymer substrate after electrical failure is measured with SEM moir′e. Focused ion beam(FIB) milling is applied to fabricate micron moir′e gratings on the surfaces of constantan wires and the random phase shifting technique is used to process moir′e fringes. The virtual strain method is briefly introduced and used to calculate the real strain of specimens. In order to study the influence of a defect on the electrical failure of the constantan wire, experiments were conducted on two specimens, one with a crack, while the other one without any crack. By comparing the results, we found that the defect makes the critical beam current of electrical failure decrease. In addition, the specimens were subjected to compression after electrical failure, in agreement with the observed crack closure of the specimen. The successful results demonstrate that the moir′e method is effective to characterize the full-field deformation of constantan wires on the polymer membrane, and has a good potential for further application to the deformation measurement of thin films.
