MAXIMISING THE INTERFACIAL TOUGHNESS OF THIN COATINGS AND SUBSTRATE THROUGH OPTIMISATION OF DEFINED PARAMETERS

The influence of three parameters, i.e. interfacial roughness λ, coating thickness h and impurity radius r at the coating–substrate interface on interfacial toughness, has been investigated within the framework of two approaches, i.e. thermodynamics and fracture mechanics. The governing equations for both the approaches have been derived independently and then fused to form a governing law for evaluating the interfacial toughness. The analysis in this paper which considers three parameters (λ, h and r) has been divided into three setups. Each setup is used to analyse the effect of one variable parameter on interfacial toughness while keeping the other two parameters constant. Three samples for each setup were prepared considering the requirements of constant and variable parameters for each setup. Simulation techniques founded on the experimental studies have been developed during this research in order to find the optimised values of three parameters. These optimised values act as critical values (boundary point) between coating fail-safe and coating fail conditions. The experiment employed ASTM-B117 test, which is used to analyse the interfacial toughness of samples under each setup. These experiments showed excellent, quantitative agreement with the simulation trends predicted by the theoretical model.