“…Therefore, an important issue is how to predict the occurrence time of such a critical fracture, namely, a critical point or precursory time. In TBCs, single isolated microcracks firstly appear, and then, with the increase of load or time of loading, they grow and multiply, leading to an increase of the crack density or length [3,5,6,37]. As a consequence, microcracks begin to merge until a critical density (or a critical length) of cracks is reached, at which the main fracture occurs.…”