Available online at ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect
J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

Finite Element Simulation on Thermal Fatigue of a Turbine Blade with

Thermal Barrier Coatings
L. Yang1,2), Q.X. Liu1,2), Y.C. Zhou1,2)*, W.G. Mao1,2), C. Lu3)
1) Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Materials & Application Technology (Ministry of Education), Xiangtan University, Xiangtan
411105, China
2) Faculty of Materials, Optoelectronic & Physics, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China
3) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia 6845, Australia
[Manuscript received December 25, 2012, in revised form February 18, 2013, Available online xxx]

In this paper, a finite element model was developed for a turbine blade with thermal barrier coatings to investigate
its failure behavior under cyclic thermal loading. Based on temperature and stress fields obtained from finite
element simulations, dangerous regions in ceramic coating were determined in terms of the maximum
principal stress criterion. The results show that damage preferentially occurs in the chamfer and rabbet of a
turbine blade with thermal barrier coatings and its thermal fatigue life decreases with the increase of thermal
stress induced by high service temperature.

KEY WORDS: Turbine blade; Thermal barrier coatings; Finite element model; Thermal fatigue; Life prediction

1. Introduction Thus, a turbine blade with TBCs usually has a very complex
shape and structure, which makes its failure assessment or life
Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are usually applied to protect prediction under harsh operating conditions much more
structural materials from hot gases in high temperature power complicated than that in metallic, ceramic components or other
engines such as gas turbines, internal combustion engines and coating systems. In other words, the failure assessment or pre-
fuel evaporators[1e3]. TBCs commonly comprise an yttria- diction for a turbine blade with TBCs is essential and desirable,
stabilized zirconia (YSZ) ceramic layer that barriers hot gases but still intractable.
to melt turbine components, a substrate that endures mechanical Spallation of ceramic coating occurs by the slow growth and
loading and a MCrAlY alloy (M represents Ni, Co, or Fe) bond eventual coalescence of sub-critical cracks, including cracks
coating that enhances adhesion of ceramic coating to substrate. within top coating and at the interface of YSZ and TGO (or TGO
By using TBCs along with internal cooling of the underlying and bond coating). The formation of these cracks is related to
superalloy components, temperature on superalloy can be local thermal stresses due to the property mismatch, oxidation,
decreased by 100e300
C[1,4]. This has allowed for a higher interfacial roughness, creep, and sintering. Therefore, thermal
engine operating temperature, thereby improving the engine ef- stresses in TBCs are very complicated but necessary to be
ficiency and performance. In this multi-layered structure, how- calculated in either the control of their failure and service life or
ever, each layer of TBCs has remarkably different physical, the design of their materials and layer geometries. Significant
thermal and mechanical properties, which result in coating fail- efforts have been dedicated towards the reliable assessment of
ures with the main type of spallation. During processing and thermal stresses of TBCs and improvement of their reliability.
further thermal exposure, a fourth layer, named as thermally For instance, theoretical models were established for thermal
grown oxide (TGO), is formed between bond and top coatings residual stress induced by the thermal mismatch and spatial
due to the diffusion and reaction of oxygen and metal ion. The variations in the growth of TGO[9,10]. Meanwhile, a number of
growth of TGO aggravates the mismatch between these layers[5e8]. experimental methods such as X-ray diffraction[11], Cr3þ piezo-
spectroscopy[12] and synchrotron radiation[13] have been applied
* in the stress testing to qualitatively explain how cracks propagate
Corresponding author. Prof., Ph.D; E-mail address: [email protected].
in TBCs. Generally, analytic solutions can be obtained to
cn (Y.C. Zhou).
1005-0302/$ e see front matter Copyright Ó 2013, The editorial office of describe biaxial thermal stress states in TBCs with a simple plate
Journal of Materials Science & Technology. Published by Elsevier shape under a linear elastic or simple elasticeplastic approxi-
Limited. All rights reserved. mation. However, these solutions cannot take into account the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmst.2013.11.005 spatial variation in the growth of TGO and the complex structure

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2 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

Fig. 1 Illustration of the finite element model of a turbine blade with TBCs.

associated with actual turbine blades. Additionally, the above- thermal barrier effect of TBCs with leading and trailing edges
mentioned stress testing techniques can only be used to without TGO, and according to their simulations on the tem-
monitor the stress evolution in a very small region, and more- perature field, the thermal barrier effect of a leading edge is better
over, their applications require strict experimental conditions. than that of a trailing edge. Lugscheider and Nickel[16] simulated
Obviously, the complex geometry shape and interface temperature and stress distributions in a blade with TBCs but
morphology lead traditional strength analysis or experimental without rabbet during a coating process, and found out that both
testing of stresses in a turbine blade with TBCs be very difficult are non-uniformly distributed. It is worth noting that, however,
or even impossible. the majority of these three-dimensional models of TBCs are a
Recently, finite element (FE) simulations have been accepted simply extended form of two-dimensional models. Experimental
as an attractive tool to estimate thermal stresses in TBCs[14e21]. results show that the failure zone of a TBC system is usually
Based on FE simulations, the stress field and especially the located in the border region of a blade body and its rabbet[23,24].
deformation evolution at interface within TBCs are extensively Thus, the potential influence of a complex geometry shape on the
investigated. In these researches, several phenomena were performance of TBCs is important, which makes any attempt
considered such as residual stresses generated during the with emphasis on simulating the fracture behavior of a turbine
spraying of coatings, the intrinsic thermal mismatch, the elastic blade with TBCs be desirable and essential.
anisotropy within ceramic coating, the morphology of interface, In this work, the thermal fracture behavior of TBCs was
the creep of TBCs layers and the growth of TGO[14e21]. The investigated under cyclic thermal loading. The FE model of a
results show that oxidation and thermal loading after cooling turbine blade with TBCs was firstly established by using the
give rise to significant compressive stresses within YSZ coating combination of CATIA and ABAQUS software. Then, the
and TGO interfaces, which results in interface cracks as well as temperature distribution and stress evolution in the turbine blade
delamination[14,19,20]. Moreover, the stress state depends were simulated, in which the effects of elasticeplastic defor-
crucially on the ratio of loading rate caused by growth and mation, high temperature creep, interfacial oxidation and depo-
swelling of TGO layer and the unloading rate by creep relaxa- sition process were considered. Finally, dangerous regions of
tion[19,21]. However, almost all these works focus on regular ceramic coating were predicted according to the maximum
plate or columnar TBCs and just a few attempts concern the principal stress criterion. Based on the prediction of dangerous
performance of TBCs with an approximate shape of turbine regions, the service life of a turbine blade with TBCs was dis-
blades[16,22e24]. For example, Wei et al.[22] investigated the cussed with the variation of temperature.

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 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10 3

Table 1 Temperature and material parameters of substrate, bond coat, TGO and top coat used in FE simulations[21,26]

Temperature Young’s Poisson’s Thermal expansion Yield strength (MPa) Thermal Specific heat Density
range (
C) modulus ratio coefficient conductivity (J/(kg K)) (kg/m3)
(GPa) (106/
C) (W/(cm K))

Substrate 20e1600 220e120 0.31e0.35 14.8e18.0 800 0.88 / 0.69 440 8500
Bond coat 20e1600 200e110 0.30e0.33 13.6e17.6 426 / 114 0.058 / 0.170 450 7380
TGO 20e1600 400e320 0.23e0.25 8.0e9.6 10,000 (20e900
C)e1000 0.10 / 0.04 755 3984
Top coat 20e1600 48e22 0.10e0.12 9.0e12.2 e 0.020 / 0.017 505 3610

2. Finite Element Model is less than 0.01 and the temperature change does not exceed
0.5
C. Adaptive meshing is also used to achieve a higher
2.1. Geometrical description accuracy.

A turbine blade with TBCs, as shown in Fig. 1, comprises the 2.2. Material properties
blade body and turbine rabbet, which are produced by depositing
a NiCrAlY bond coating and a ZrO28 wt% Y2O3 ceramic Each layer of a turbine blade with TBCs, including ceramic
coating on a Ni-based alloy substrate with internal hollow coating, bond coating, TGO and substrate, is treated as an
cooling passages. The thicknesses of bond and ceramic coatings isotropic and homogeneous material. The physical and thermal
are 100 mm and 300 mm, respectively. Commonly, TGO formed properties of coatings and base alloy are listed in Table 1[21,27],
during the high temperature oxidation has the maximum thick- which are temperature-dependence with a linear elastic behavior.
ness of about 10e50 mm, and its morphology including thick- The ceramic coating is capable of deforming elastically, creep,
ness, microstructure, composition as well as the roughness of and then cracking if stress is equal to its tensile strength ac-
ceramic/bond coatings’ interface are non-uniformly distributed cording to the maximum stress principle. The creep behavior of
in TBCs[12,14,19,25]. Morphological instability of TGO results in ceramic coating is described by[21]
different thickness in each layer, and is a fundamental source of
failure in TBCs[12,14,19,25,26]. The thickness of TGO, however, is 3_ ¼ Asn (1)
experimentally found that has a negligible influence on stress in
thick ceramic coating (>50 mm)[26]. In considering of simulating where 3_ is the strain rate, A is the creep prefactor, s is the von
the fracture behavior of TBCs with a complex turbine blade Mises equivalent stress, and n is the creep exponent. In this
structure, here, the flat interface is assumed and the TGO is set to paper, the creep prefactor and exponent are chosen as
be 20 mm thick without the morphological instability in order to A ¼ 1.8  1.88 and n ¼ 1[21]. Due to the thermal barrier
decrease the calculation time. The thicknesses of substrate for effect of ceramic coating, temperatures of bond coating and
blade and rabbet are about 1 mm and 8 mm, respectively. The internal substrate remain below 800
C and thus their creep
length of the blade body is 50 mm. The base material and deformations are not taken into account. Both the bond coating
coatings are modeled with the combination of the CAD software and substrate are regarded as ideal elasticeplastic materials.
CATIA and the FE software ABAQUS. The geometry shapes Here, it is worth noting that, to limit stress to the level found in
and dimensions of ceramic coating, TGO, bond coating, and experiments[11,26], TGO is allowed to undergo the stress
substrate are firstly built up in CATIA, and then merged together relaxation at high temperature, which is realized by introducing
in ABAQUS. The FE model of a turbine blade with TBCs is the yield strength of TGO at the peak temperature[5,21]. At a
shown in Fig. 1. Several assumptions have been made for lower temperature, TGO behaves like an elastic medium[5,21].
simplification such as: (1) only one cooling passage is consid- This protocol allows that a high temperature stress in TGO
ered for both the blade body and rabbet; (2) the geometry shape never exceeds the yield strength and a larger stress can be
of rabbet is regarded as a rectangle; (3) in each layer, its thick- applied when cooling. The yield strength of TGO is also varied
ness is the same; (4) no thermal convection or emission occurs; with temperature, which decreases linearly from 10 to 1 GPa
(5) the phase transformation and sintering of ceramic coating is with the increase of temperature from 900 to 1600
C, as listed
not considered; and (6) interfaces in TBCs are all undamaged. in Table 1 [21].
The hexahedron plane strain element (C3D8RT) for the tur-
bine blade and rabbet and the tetrahedron plane strain element 2.3. Boundary conditions
(C3D4T) for the connection region between blade and rabbet are
chosen. The number of elements in meshing is limited to an To simulate the thermal cycling, a turbine blade with TBCs is
acceptable value in consideration of both the accuracy of nu- assumed to be fixed in an equipment that does not make TBCs
merical solutions and calculation time. Damage in ceramic rotate. Therefore, the boundary conditions in the FE model of a
coating is preferential failure in TBCs, and its temperature, turbine blade with TBCs, as shown in Fig. 1, are set as follows:
displacement and stress evolution should be accurately calcu- (1) The displacement in the z direction is zero, i.e., w ¼ 0, on the
lated. Thus, elements are densest in ceramic coating. The study bottom surface of the turbine rabbet; and (2) the central line of
on the mesh sensitivity revealed that an adequate accuracy can be the bottom surface of the turbine rabbet cannot move along the x
achieved by using about 210,000 elements for a turbine blade and y directions. In this case, the bottom surface of the turbine
with TBCs. The iterative solution is stopped if the value of the rabbet can only expand symmetrically along the x or y direction,
maximum residual force divided by the maximum reaction force and cannot move along the z direction or rotate in the xey plane.

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4 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

Fig. 2 A typical thermal cycle for a turbine blade with TBCs, which
contains three steps: heating, holding and cooling.

2.4. Thermal loading

The stress produced in deposition is a major source of stresses

in a TBC system, which should be calculated in the analysis of
stress evolution in a turbine blade with TBCs. Therefore, the
thermal loading investigated in this paper consists of coating
deposition and thermal cycling. For the former, the turbine blade
with TBCs is cooled from a deposition temperature of 600
C[16],
at which the initial stress in the whole turbine blade is zero[21]. A
thermal cycle is defined as a 2-min heating, a 5-min insulating
and then a 5-min cooling to room temperature. In details, as Fig. 3 Temperature distributions in the holding stage: (a) temperature
shown in Fig. 2, the surface of top ceramic coating is heated up contours of the whole TBC system; and (b) temperature distri-
to 1200
C from room temperature in 2 min, kept at 1200
C for butions through the cross section of selected sections, where
5 min, and then cooled to room temperature (20
C) in 5 min. paths are selected from surface to interface of bond coat and
The temperature of the inner surface of substrate, i.e., the cooling substrate.
channel, is heated up to 700
C in 2 min, kept at 700
C for
5 min, and then cooled to room temperature (20
C) in 5 min.
than that of the other areas, such as the suction or pressure side.
Obviously, there is a temperature gradient in layers of TBCs
This is in good agreement with the available results[28]. Obvi-
during a thermal cycling. In addition, the thermal radiation and
ously, it is attributed to the unavoidably small and narrow
convection of a TBC system is not considered.
dimension of a cooling channel in the case of only one of
channels is considered.
3. Results and Discussion
3.2. Displacement and strain distributions
3.1. Thermal barrier effect
When a turbine blade with TBCs experiences a cooling stage
Fig. 3 shows the temperature distribution of a turbine blade from deposition to room temperatures, inhomogeneous de-
with TBCs at the insulating state of thermal cycles, where formations are caused due to the thermal mismatch between
temperatures in the system are steady and the highest, and thus different layers, as well as their geometry shapes. Fig. 4 shows
temperatures at different sites directly reflect the thermal barrier the distribution and magnitude of the U1, U2 and U3, which are
effect of TBCs associated with their geometry shapes. As the displacements along x, y, and z direction after deposition, i.e.,
mentioned in Section 2.4, temperatures of the outside surface of cooling to room temperature from 600
C, for two aspect di-
ceramic coating and the inner surface of substrate are kept at rections of the turbine blade. It is obvious in Fig. 4 that the
1200 and 700
C, respectively. It is seen that temperature de- displacement in each direction is non-uniform in different re-
creases gradually from the outside surface of ceramic coating to gions of ceramic coating, especially for U2. The magnitude of
substrate due to the thermal barrier effect of TBCs and inner displacement U1 is negative and decreases along the x positive
cooling. In order to show the difference of a temperature field in direction with a minimum value of 0.0131 mm at the leading
TBCs, temperature distributions in typical regions as designated edge, but is positive and increases along the x negative direction
in Fig. 3(a), including the leading edge, pressure side, trailing with a maximum value of 0.0136 mm at the trailing edge. This is
edge and suction side, are shown in Fig. 3(b). The temperature attributed to the approximate symmetrical shape and the
difference in the coating thickness direction of TBCs is not boundary condition. Due to the contraction caused by cooling,
uniform in these regions. Temperature of the bond coating/sub- TBC moves towards the fixed boundary of the line with y ¼ 0,
strate interface ranges from 734 to 859
C, i.e., the thermal and thus the displacement is negative along the x direction but
barrier effect of TBCs is between 262
C and 387
C at the positive along the opposite x direction. Moreover, the displace-
different locations. It is also seen that temperature values near ment should be cumulative with the increase of coordinate
edges, especially at the trailing edge regions are relatively higher values, which makes the displacement reach maximum or

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Fig. 4 Distribution and magnitude of U1, U2 and U3 displacements after deposition, heating, holding and cooling during the first thermal cycle in two
aspect directions of a turbine blade.

minimum at edges. Similarly, the displacement U2 along the

thickness direction shows an opposite symbol at the pressure
side compared to that of the suction side, at which U2 is negative
due to the cooling contraction along the y positive direction. It is
seen that the extremum of U2 locates at the top or bottom of
the central for suction or pressure side. Similarly, the axial
displacement U3 is negative due to the cooling contraction along
the z positive direction. The z-axis locates at the bottom surface
of turbine rabbet, and thus the top of blade body has the
maximum displacement, and the bottom surface of rabbet is
slightly upward curved.
As shown in Fig. 5, four maps represent the displacements at
the ends of preparation, heating, holding, and cooling stages,
respectively. In the case of TBC along the y positive direction, it Fig. 5 Out-of-plane displacement contours of a TBC system in the first
is seen that displacements initiate negative due to the initial thermal cycle. The starting and ending points at each step during
cooling contraction, reverse to positive attributed to heating the first thermal cycle are considered. The line represents the
expansion, and then exhibit a small increase in the holding temperature distribution of the first thermal cycle.

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6 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

Fig. 6 Simulation results of strain, 3 11, as a typical component of the strain field, at the end of each cycling stage.

temperature stage, finally return to negative after cooling. It is suction or pressure side tend to produce a maximum displace-
worth noting that the displacement distribution is not uniform in ment with the occurrence of bigger strains, where dangerous
each stage, indicating that the deformation of TBCs is greatly sites and sub-critical cracks preferentially form.
affected by the irregular geometry shape of a turbine blade. To analyze the role of geometry shape in deformation of a
Fig. 5 also shows that the regions located at the top, bottom of turbine blade with TBCs, the results of tensile strain along x

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 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10 7

the strain of region A increases from 0.009967 after deposition

to 0.009944 at the end of the first cycle. Obviously, such a
strain evolution process can be reasonably explained by the
thermal cycling, i.e., heating expansion and cooling contraction.
Similar to the feature of displacements, the distribution of 3 11 is
directly influenced by the shape change. The maximum
compressive strain is 0.009967 at the top of pressure side, as
signed A in Fig. 6. Relative higher strains develop at the central
line of suction side, the bottom of pressure side, etc. These re-
gions are dangerous sites for cracking or spallation of coating.
Fig. 7 depicts the strain evolution at the end of heating and
cooling stage. Tensile normal strains develop in the heating stage
with the maximum component of 3 22, which is the tensile strain
along y direction and results in lateral cracks in the interface
between top ceramic coating and TGO. Although the normal
strain components 3 11 are moderate, the surface vertical cracks in
ceramic coating occur because it can only tolerate the moderate
tensile strain due to porous structures. Generally, strains within
ceramic coating after cooling, for example, the resulting strain
components of 3 11, 3 33, 3 12, 3 13 and 3 23, as shown in Fig. 7(b), are
compressive, which are caused by the cooling contraction and
thermal mismatch. In particular, the out-plane strain, 3 22, re-
verses to the tensile strain after about 20 cycles and its value
Fig. 7 Evolution of strain components at location A (as shown in
Fig. 6) developed from (a) heating and (b) cooling with the increases with the increase of thermal cycles, which could lead to
number of cycles, respectively. delamination at interface. The reason of the large strain values, as
shown in Fig. 7, is due to the use of a linear elastic model for
TBC in FE simulations. It is worth noting that, however, the
direction, 3 11, as a typical component of the strain field, at the shear strain component, which is equal to two times of 3 12, 3 13 or
end of each cycling stage, are shown in Fig. 6. After deposition, 23 23, is small and not crucial to failure of TBCs.
the compressive strain in ceramic coating is attributed to the It has shown that the fracture behavior of TBCs is strongly
cooling contraction from a free state at deposition temperature, influenced by their creep properties[21,27,29]. For this reason, the
while reverses to tensile strain on heating. As holding begins, the creep of ceramic coating is considered in simulations of a turbine
tensile strain of the whole ceramic coating gradually increases. blade with TBCs. For simplification, only the equivalent strains
On cooling, the compressive strain develops and shows a little from creep and their corresponding strain rates are calculated
increase in magnitude due to creep at high temperature; such as, during the holding temperature stage in thermal cycling. As
shown in Fig. 8(a), creep strains exhibit slightly higher in
pressure and suction sides, where ceramic coating has a rela-
tively bigger temperature gradient than other regions illustrated
in Fig. 4. The magnitudes of creep strain at locations A, E, and H
are small but rapidly increase with the thermal cycles. As the
cycle proceeds, the accumulative creep strains tend to saturate,
with the decrease of the creep strain rate, as shown in Fig. 8(b).
The predicted magnitude and evolution of the creep strain rate of
ceramic coating coincide with that reported in literature[30].

3.3. Stress distribution

The coating quality is strongly dependent on residual stresses

in TBCs produced from deposition[9,27,29]. Generally, the
deposited ceramic coating after the rapid contraction of sprayed
splat reaches an equilibrium temperature that is the same as the
underlying materials (600
C), at which the TBC system is
regarded as a non-stress state. Simultaneously and slowly cooled
down, the thermal transfer in the whole system proceeds through
the convection with environment, leading to the decrease of
temperature until 20
C, which creates a thermal stress. During
cooling to room temperature, the difference of thermal expansion
coefficients between deposit and substrate causes in-plane
compressive stresses, s11, in ceramic coating, as shown in
Fig. 9. It is seen that the final compressive stresses in ceramic
Fig. 8 Relationships between (a) equivalent strains from creep and (b) coating after the spraying range from 10 to 180 MPa. The
the creep strain rate with the cycle number, respectively. major types and magnitudes of stresses in ceramic coating are in

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8 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

Fig. 9 In-plane stress contours, s11, in top ceramic coat during a whole thermal cycle from both pressure and suction sides of a turbine blade with TBCs.

accordance with analytical results[9,26,35] and experimental increases with the curvature radius, showing noticeable higher
data[31,32], which are in the range of 14 to 92 MPa. More- values at pressure and suction sides and reaching 200 MPa at
over, the stress distribution has the same characteristic as that of location A, but changing to tensile stresses at trailing and leading
strain component 3 11 (see Fig. 6), which is determined by the edges. Obviously, the geometry shape of a turbine blade with
constitutive relation. The magnitude of the compressive stress TBCs has an important effect on stress distribution.

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 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10 9

Fig. 12 Predicted thermal cycles of failure that emerges in top ceramic

coat under different working temperatures.

stress evolution with thermal cycles in region A is plotted in

Fig. 10, where stress components at the end of heating and
cooling stages are shown, respectively. It is seen that compres-
sive stresses s11 and s33 developed at the end of heating stage
decrease with a small rate and then reach a steady value of
about 20 MPa after 40 thermal cycles. For residual stresses s11
Fig. 10 Stress evolution with thermal cycles in region A (as shown in
Fig. 9), at which stress components at the end of heating (a) and
and s33 formed after cooling in a thermal cycling, the stress
cooling (b) stages are shown, respectively. reversal (from compression to tension) is observed with a satu-
ration value of about 130 and 75 MPa, respectively. Stresses at
location A show that the maximum component is s11 in both
The distribution of in-plane stresses, s11, as shown in Fig. 9, heating and cooling stages. Such a stress could trigger a crack
presents the evolution during a whole thermal cycle. It is seen vertical to the TBC interface in ceramic coating. Fig. 10 also
that compressive stresses in ceramic coating gradually decrease shows that shear stresses of ceramic coating are not high and
during heating or holding at high temperature due to the heating have a trivial effect on failure of TBCs. Another interesting point
expansion and creep strain. Although compressive stresses in Fig. 10 is that out-of-plane stresses, s22, are about zero at
develop in ceramic coating on cooling, the absolute values of location A, which is in agreement with the free surface boundary
stresses decrease compared to that of initial residual stresses due condition of ceramic coating.
to the relaxation creep from ceramic coating. As an example, the
3.4. Dangerous regions

For simplification, the maximum principal stress is chosen to

predict failure in a turbine blade with TBCs. According to the
maximum tensile stress criterion, failure takes place at locations
where the maximum principal stress reaches the strength of top
ceramic coating. Fig. 11 shows the stress contours in top ceramic
coating from both pressure and suction sides of a turbine blade
with TBCs. The higher stresses located in ceramic coating during
the thermal cycling, marked with A to H in Fig. 11, are regarded
as dangerous regions, which are consistent with that observed
from experiments[23,24]. The curves, as shown in Fig. 11, give
information on the evolution of the maximum principal stresses
in these dangerous regions with the thermal cycling. It is clear
that compressive stresses during initial 12 cycles are
about 10 MPa. Given that the compressive strength of YSZ
is 500 MPa[33], the compressive stress-driven damage, such as
buckling and delamination, would not occur.
As shown in Fig. 11, the tensile stress in these marked loca-
tions rises very quickly until the 40th thermal cycle. Then, for
locations of A and C, stress values are nearly the same. The
stress of location H keeps increasing, which exceeds the stress
values of A and C at the 36th thermal cycle. Here, the inelastic
deformation plays a very important role in the stress evolu-
Fig. 11 Maximum principal stress contours and stress evolution of tion[34], which consists of plastic and creep deformations. The
dangerous regions in top ceramic coat at the end of 100 thermal plastic deformation causes the increase of stress during the first
cycles. The top ceramic coat is separated from the model. 14 thermal cycles, and then creep leads to the stress relaxation.

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10 L. Yang et al.: J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2013, -(-), 1e10

3.5. Influence of temperature 11002121), the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province,
China (No. 11JJ4003) and the Key Project of Scientific Research
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ature on the inner surface of cooling channel is assumed to be
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Acknowledgments
Ceramic Coating under Thermo-mechanical Loadings, Ph.D.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Thesis, Xiangtan University, 2006 (in Chinese).
Foundation of China (Nos. 11002122, 51172192, 11272275 and

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