Object-Oriented Finite Element Analysis to Simulate Microindentation of Thermal Sprayed MAX-phase coatings

Object-Oriented Finite element analysis (OOF) has recently been shown as an effective tool for evaluating thermo-mechanical material behaviour, because of its capability to incorporate the inherent material microstructure as an input to the model. The complexity of a thermal sprayed microstructure makes it difficult to model and simulate by classical analytical or numerical techniques and thus very appropriate for this approach. In this paper instrumented micro-indentation and meshing in the OOF program was combined with a nonlinear finite element analysis to determine elastic-plastic properties of thermal sprayed Ti2AlC coatings; the significance of the findings is discussed in this article.