（1.School of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Xidian University, Xi‘an 710126, China）（2. School of Materials and Engineering, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China）
Thermal barrier coatings (TBCs), with high temperature durability and excellent heat insulation, can effectively reduce the working temperature of metal base made for turbine blade, bringing about a significant improvement in both efficiency and performance of engines. Therefore, TBCs have been continually developed as a key thermal protection technique for aero-engines. However, TBCs are likely to be subject to serious damage like coating crack, interface crack, deformation and so on under serving at the complicated environment including gas shock, erosion, corrosion, etc., which finally will peel off and fail to function. Acoustic emission technology can real-timely detect crack’s initiation and evolution process in TBCs nondestructively, which is an effective method to supervise the failure process, discover the failure mechanism and predict the failure-time for TBCs. In this paper, research progress of the high temperature acoustic emission technology on detection of the failure for TBCs will be introduced, and the method itself, crack mode identification, quantitative damage evaluation and failure mechanisms of TBCs obtained based on the method will all be elaborated in detail.