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

SBIR第一阶段项目的更广泛影响将是提高燃气轮机发动机的安全性和可靠性，并降低运营成本，这项技术通过提供电力和飞机推进来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，使这一项目对美国福利的这些方面产生了很大影响。燃气轮机发动机含有镍合金叶片，必须定期仔细检查和维修，以确保故障不会意外发生，因为在使用中的故障不可避免地会导致发动机的灾难性损坏。修复的完整性在很大程度上取决于为修补发动机叶片上的裂纹和空洞而设计的填充合金的机械性能，该项目旨在通过以基础科学为基础的新型冶金设计来改善这一点。整个科学界都将从这项研究中受益，因为它将开创一种新兴材料类别中合金的应用开发，而这一新兴材料类别的制造只有20年的时间。由于卓越的性能和相似的成本，设计的合金将比现有的修复产品具有商业优势。这一优势将构成成功商机的核心，随着业务的扩张，商机将产生收入并提供STEM就业机会。当从头开始设计新的合金，而不是对现有合金进行修改时，多主元素合金中出现了无限的可能性，涉及哪些金属元素和什么浓度，这就需要仔细的设计战略，以有效地确定特定应用的候选元素。作为其强大的技术创新，该项目采用了以基础物理计算为基础的严格的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，目的是确定对机械性能不利的相最有可能被抑制的合金成分。该项目将设计和测试合金，以应对跨行业的挑战-首先也是最重要的，填补复杂镍基高温合金的裂缝，这些合金旨在用于燃气轮机发动机的恶劣运行环境。该项目的大部分工作范围将涉及一个审查过程，以测试在进行裂纹修复后，填充合金是否能够经受住这些恶劣的条件。在模拟环境中验证它们的长期冶金和机械可行性将具有关键的行业意义。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势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.