Thermal Barrier Coating Spallation: TGO Growth-Driven Buckling

Thermal barrier coatings protect turbine blades from gas temperatures that would otherwise melt the metal beneath them, but the coating's own protective mechanism eventually destroys it. Every thermal cycle grows a thin oxide layer — the thermally grown oxide (TGO) — at the bond coat interface, and because that oxide expands and contracts differently from the metal around it, cooling locks in growing residual stress. This simulator grows a real 20×20 patch of TGO across simulated thermal cycles using parabolic oxidation kinetics, tracks the buckling-driven strain energy release rate at every patch from local interface roughness, and pops a patch of ceramic top coat free the instant its stored energy exceeds the interface's fracture toughness — reproducing, patch by patch, the exact mechanism that limits real coating service life.