SBIR Phase I: Multi-principal element alloy fillers for toughness enhancement in repair of Ni-base superalloy components

该SBIR第一阶段项目的更广泛影响将是提高燃气涡轮机发动机的安全性和可靠性，并降低其运营成本，该技术通过提供电力和飞机推进力影响美国人的日常生活。此外，国防和能源行业特别依赖这项技术，这使得该项目对美国福利的这些方面产生了重大影响。燃气涡轮机发动机包含镍合金叶片，必须定期仔细检查和维修，以确保故障不会意外发生，因为使用中的故障不可避免地会导致灾难性的发动机损坏。 修复的完整性在很大程度上取决于用于修补发动机叶片中裂纹和空腔的填充合金的机械性能，该项目旨在通过基于基础科学的新型冶金设计来改进。 整个科学界将从这项研究中受益，因为它将在一个新兴材料类别中开创合金的应用开发，而这一新兴材料类别只有20年的历史。 由于上级性能和相似的成本，设计的合金将具有优于现有修复产品的商业优势。 这一优势将构成成功商业机会的核心，随着业务的扩展，这将产生收入并提供STEM工作。 当从头开始设计新合金时，而不是对现有合金进行修改时，在多主元素合金中出现了关于包括哪些金属元素以及以何种浓度的无限可能性，需要仔细的设计策略来有效地识别特定应用的候选者。作为其强大的技术创新，该项目采用了基于基础物理计算的严格合金选择策略来实现这一结果。平衡和非平衡冶金热力学计算构成了选择策略的核心，旨在确定最有可能抑制对机械性能有害的相的合金成分。该项目将设计和测试合金，以解决跨领域的工业挑战-首先，填补复杂的镍基高温合金的裂纹，设计用于燃气涡轮机发动机的恶劣工作环境。 该项目的大部分工作范围将涉及审查过程，以测试填充合金是否能够承受裂缝修复后的这些恶劣条件。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact of this SBIR Phase I project will be to improve safety and reliability, and to reduce operating costs, for gas turbine engines, a technology that impacts the daily lives of Americans by providing electric power and aircraft propulsion. Moreover, the national defense and energy industries are particularly reliant upon this technology, making this project highly impactful to these aspects of American welfare. Gas turbine engines contain nickel alloy blades, which must be carefully inspected and repaired at regular intervals to ensure failure never occurs unexpectedly, as in-service failures inevitably result in catastrophic engine damage. The integrity of repairs is largely dependent upon mechanical performance of filler alloys designed to patch cracks and cavities in the engine blades, which this project aims to improve through novel metallurgical design grounded in fundamental science. The scientific community at large will benefit from this research, as it will pioneer applied development for alloys within an emerging material class only two decades in the making. Designed alloys will have a commercial advantage over existing repair products due to superior performance and similar cost. This advantage will form the core of a successful business opportunity, which will generate revenue and provide STEM jobs as the business expands. When designing new alloys from the ground up, rather than making modifications to existing alloys, limitless possibilities arise in multi-principal element alloys regarding which metallic elements to include and in what concentrations, necessitating a careful design strategy to efficiently identify candidates for a particular application. This project employs, as its strong technical innovation, a rigorous alloy selection strategy grounded in fundamental physics-based calculations to achieve this outcome. Equilibrium and non-equilibrium metallurgical thermodynamics calculations form the core of the selection strategy, with the aim to identify alloy compositions in which phases detrimental to mechanical performance are most likely to be suppressed. The project will design and test alloys to address cross-cutting industrial challenges – first and foremost, filling cracks in complex nickel-base superalloys designed for use in the harsh operating environment of a gas turbine engine. Much of the scope of work in this project will involve a vetting process to test whether the filler alloys can withstand these harsh conditions after crack repairs are performed. It will be of critical industrial relevance to validate their long-term metallurgical and mechanical viability in a simulated environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.