A software tool to design thermal barrier coatings: A technical note

This paper summarizes work completed for a NASA Phase I SBIR program that demonstrated the feasibility of developing a software tool to aid in the design of thermal barrier coating (TBC) systems, Toward this goal, three tasks were undertaken and completed, Task 1 involved the development of a database containing the pertinent thermal and mechanical property data for the top coat, bond coat, and substrate materials that constitute a TBC system, Task 2 involved the development of an automated setup program for generating two-dimensional finite-element analysis (FEA) models of TBC systems, Most importantly, task 3 involved the generation of a rule base to aid in the design of a TBC system. These rules were based on a factorial design of experiments involving FEA results and were generated using a Yates analysis, A previous study had indicated the suitability and benefit of applying FEA to perform computer-based experiments to decrease but not eliminate physical experiments on TBCs, This program expanded on these findings by developing a larger knowledge base and a procedure to extract rules to aid in the TBC design.