Assessment of the Adhesion of Ceramic Coatings

A number of methods have been proposed to assess the adhesion of ceramic coatings including pull-off, shockwave, bending, scratch, and indentation tests. With the development of new coatings, the need for reliable adhesion tests is paramount, but it is not always easy to select an appropriate adhesion test, particularly for sub-micron coatings. Indentation tests are suitable in such cases provided that the interfacial failure mode is understood and can be modelled. This paper reviews the existing models and our newly developed models to extract quantitative adhesion data in such cases.