Nowadays, coatings have a significant role in increasing the lifetime of manufactured products. A coating layer applied to the surface of a product increases its corrosion and wear resistance. As with any other materials, coatings are subjected to damage phenomena. The damage of the coating layer usually happens because of delamination and crack propagation inside the coating layer. In order to know how to improve the coating resistance the fracture behavior is studied using finite element analysis. The system under analysis consists of two parts: the coating layer and the substrate.

The Cohesive Zone Modelling technique is used to predict and describe the damage initialization and propagation. The delamination behavior is described with the cohesive elements between the coating and the substrate. Inside the coating layer, the crack usually propagates between the grains of the material. Therefore, to capture an intergranular fracture behavior first a microstructure model of the coating layer is generated, then cohesive elements are placed between the grains of the coating. For this purpose, a mathematical tool called the Voronoi diagram, which mimics the grain structure of materials, is implemented in the MATLAB script.

Tensile tests and nanoindentation tests were performed in this project to validate the coating-substrate model with cohesive zone elements.

The results showed that it is possible to vary the morphology of the microstructure and to change the damage behavior in the coating. The developed scripts could be used to obtain quantitatively accurate results of the coating microstructure response under loads.