Mechanical Characterisation of thermal barrier coatings using a micro-indentation instrumented technique

An original instrumented microindenter capable of testing materials up to 1000 degrees C in an inert atmosphere has been developed. The method of neural networks is used to solve the inverse problem, in order to determine the constitutive equation of the materials tested, To obtain a data basis for the training and validation of the neural network, finite element simulations were carried out for various sets of material parameters. To reduce the number of simulations a representative sampling of the loading-strain responses is performed using an unsupervised network, so-called self-organizing map.