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

SBIR一期项目的广泛影响将是提高燃气涡轮发动机的安全性和可靠性，并降低运行成本。燃气涡轮发动机是一项通过提供电力和飞机推进而影响美国人日常生活的技术。此外，国防和能源工业特别依赖于这项技术，这使得该项目对美国福利的这些方面产生了很大的影响。燃气涡轮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，因为在使用中故障不可避免地会导致灾难性的发动机损坏。维修的完整性在很大程度上取决于填充合金的机械性能，该合金用于修补发动机叶片中的裂纹和空洞，该项目旨在通过基于基础科学的新型冶金设计来改善这一点。整个科学界将从这项研究中受益，因为它将在一种新兴材料类别中率先应用开发合金，这种材料仅用了20年的时间。与现有的维修产品相比，设计的合金将具有商业优势，因为它具有优越的性能和相似的成本。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工作岗位。当从头开始设计新合金时，而不是对现有合金进行修改，多主元素合金中包含的金属元素及其浓度产生了无限的可能性，因此需要仔细的设计策略来有效地识别特定应用的候选元素。该项目采用了基于基础物理计算的严格合金选择策略，作为其强大的技术创新，以实现这一结果。平衡和非平衡冶金热力学计算构成了选择策略的核心，其目的是确定最有可能抑制对机械性能有害的合金成分。该项目将设计和测试合金，以解决跨领域的工业挑战——首先，填补用于燃气涡轮发动机恶劣工作环境的复杂镍基高温合金的裂纹。该项目的大部分工作范围将涉及审查过程，以测试填充合金在进行裂纹修复后是否能够承受这些恶劣条件。在模拟环境中验证其长期冶金和机械可行性将具有重要的工业意义。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.