Establishment of Relationships between Coating Microstructure and Thermal Conductivity in Thermal Barrier Coatings by Finite Element Modelling

Abstract: Plasma sprayed Thermal Barrier Coating systems (TBCs) are commonly used for thermal protection of components in modern gas turbine application such as power generation, marine and aero engines. The material that is most commonly used in these applications is Yttria Partially Stabilized Zirconia (YPSZ) because of this ceramic’s favourable properties, such as low thermal conductivity, phase stability to high temperature, and good erosion resistance. The coating microstructures in YPSZ coatings are highly heterogeneous, consisting of defects such as pores and cracks of different sizes which determine the coating’s final thermal and mechanical properties, and the service lives of the coatings. Determination of quantitative microstructure–property correlations is of great interest as experimental procedures are time consuming and expensive. Significant attention has been given to this field, especially in last fifteen years. The usual approach for modelling was to describe various microstructural features in some way, so as to determine their influence on the overall thermal conductivity of the coating. As the analytical models over-simplified the description of the defects, various numerical models were developed which incorporated real microstructure images.This thesis work describes two modelling approaches to further investigate the relationships between microstructure and thermal conductivity of TBCs. The first modelling approach uses a combination of a statistical model and a finite element model which could be used to evaluate and verify the relationship between microstructural defects and thermal conductivity. The second modelling approach uses the same finite element model along with a coating morphology generator, and can be used to design low thermal conductivity TBCs. A tentative verification of both the approaches has been done in this work.