DMREF: GOALI: Mechanistic and Microstructure-Based Design Approach for Rapid Prototyping of Superalloys

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Non-Technical Summary:Increasing the high temperature strength and durability of superalloys used in aerospace turbine engines will lead to enhanced engine efficiency and reduced fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Presently, improvement in superalloy performance has relied on trial-and-error alloy modification, which is utterly insufficient for materials innovation to keep pace with new engine design, leading to inevitable compromise in fuel efficiency and emissions goals. This award supports research that will develop a novel and efficient approach to connect alloy composition, microstructure and properties and enable more rapid and cost-effective superalloy advancement. The approach employs an innovative combination of cost-effective, rapid prototyping of highly relevant alloy compositions, with extensive modeling at essential length scales, and validating experiments and characterization tasks. Addressing these challenges will require close interaction with the project partner, GE Global Research, bringing practical experience and processing facilities to the project.Technical Summary:Improvement in superalloy performance has relied on trial-and-error alloy modification, which is insufficient for materials innovation to keep pace with new engine design, leading to inevitable compromise in performance and fuel efficiency goals. This award supports an integrated experimental and computational research that aims to improve our basic understanding of these important alloys, develop predictive models of behavior from atomistic through mesoscale to aggregate (polycrystalline) levels, and to demonstrate the capabilities of the modeling tools developed through optimization of superalloys for performance at high temperature. The program is enabled by a novel rapid prototyping approach that will for the first time explore the inter-related effects of superalloy composition, microstructure, deformation mechanisms and creep response by producing a series of six-component alloys via a cast and wrought process at GE-GRC. This will be demonstrated by predicting optimized alloy composition / microstructure with enhanced properties relative to a present commercial alloy. Addressing these challenges will require close interaction with the GOALI partner, GE Global Research, bringing practical experience and processing facilities to the project.