Plasma-sprayed coatings are widely used for thermal protection and wear stability of structural components. These coatings feature an anisotropic porous structure as a result of the thermal spraying process. To our knowledge little research is dedicated to describing the temperature-dependent plastic behavior of these coatings, let alone to identifying the coating's properties when subjected to macro-scale contacts encountered in industrial applications. In this work we present a novel inverse method for the identification of plastic properties of thick plasma-sprayed coatings over a wide temperature range by means of macro-indentation and finite element simulations coupled to a Levenberg-Marquardt optimization. For the description of the coatings' plastic behavior we made use of the Gurson-Tvergaard plasticity criterion coupled to a linear isotropic work hardening of the matrix. The constitutive parameters to be identified include the yield strength ?y0(T) and the work hardening coefficient K(T) of the solid matrix as function of temperature as well as two dimensionless fitting parameters q1 and q2 and the initial void fraction f0 that are proper to the Gurson plasticity criterion. We could show that the proposed method is capable of identifying these parameters after as little as three iterations
