Thermal loading and spallation

[montavala]

My system consists of substrate (which is a carbon composite) with CVD deposited SiC layer and with oxide coating deposited over SiC. The cracking of the SiC layer occurs during cooling after the deposition. The same happens later with the oxide layer.
I saw that many authors mentioned FE analysis as a method for solving such problems, but however I haven't seen anywhere a sufficient mathematical approach which would perhaps help me to understand better this process.

Since recently I have been using FEMLAB, but the couple of weeks ago they told me that it's not yet possible to solve plastic deformation with their program.
I guess Ansys would be helpful, but as much as I could see, it's not so user friendly like FEMLAB. I'm actually interested in your experience with such problems. Did you have them? How did you solve them? Is it possible to write such Problem as a system of coupled partial differential equations?
However, my background is the chemical engineering, and I haven't dealt yet with such problems.

 

[ParaDoc]

...it seems to me a problem of thermal stresses developing at the interface of the deposited layer and the substrate during cooling down. To my knowledge there are a great many FEM-cotes which should be suitable for treating this problem. For example ABAQUS, MARC, ANSYS and the like. All what has to be done on the modelling side is to provide a suitable definition of the appropriate material properties (thermo-visco-elastic properties)of the layer as well the substrate. Then you are solving an ordinary initial- and boundary-value problem!