A Viscoplastic Modeling Approach for MCrAlY Protective Coatings for Gas Turbine Applications

MCrAlY coatings are applied in industrial gas turbines and aircraft engines to protect surfaces of hot gas exposed components from oxidation and corrosion at elevated temperature. Apart from oxidation resistance, coatings have to withstand cracking caused by cyclic deformation since coating cracks might propagate into the substrate material and thus limit the lifetime of the parts. In this context, the prediction of the coating maximum stress and the strain range during cyclic loading is important for the lifetime analysis of coated components. Analyzing the state of stress in the coating requires the application of viscoplastic material models. A coupled full-scale cyclic analysis of substrate and coating, however, is very expensive because of the different flow characteristics of both materials. Therefore, this paper proposes an uncoupled modeling approach, which consists of a full-scale cyclic analysis of the component without coating and a fast postprocessing procedure based on a node-by-node integration of the coating constitutive model. This paper presents different aspects of the coating viscoplastic behavior and their computational modeling. The uncoupled analysis is explained in detail and a validation of the procedure is addressed. Finally, the application of the uncoupled modeling approach to a coated turbine blade exposed to a complex engine start-up and shut-down procedure is shown. Throughout the paper bold symbols denote tensors and vectors, e.g., $σ$ stands for the stress tensor with the components $σij$⁠. The superscripts $(.)S$ and $(.)C$ symbolize the substrate and the coating, respectively, e.g., $εthS$ stands for the tensor of substrate thermal strain. Further symbols are explained in the text.