High precision thermodynamic modeling for superalloy design

The successful development of superalloys over the last 60 years provides us with the engineering alloys for todays air travel as well as todays power generation. This development was mostly based an empirical research resulting in the 10+ elements compositions of modern superalloys. Because of the high complexity of there alloy systems increasingly computational design tools are employed to drive further alloy developement. Very powerful thermodynamic modeling Software is available now and it becomes more and more clear, that the predicting power of such calculations for the constitution of higher order systems depends critically an the precision of the data an the binary and ternary subsysterns involved. Thus, there is a need to provide increasingly higher precision experimental data an these systems as well as closely matching thermodynamic models for them. Such data were generated in a previous FWF project involving the elements Cr,Ni,Ti,Si and C. lt was shown there, that just like in crystallography or microscopy increasing the precision of the data increases the resolution of the observations and allows new discoveries. The present project extends such investigations to include the element alutninium. The extended data base for these elements will comprise descriptions of the ternary systems AI-Cr-Ni, the basic system for superalloys, as well as several others such as Ni-Ti-Si, Cr-Ni-Ti, AI-Cr-Ti, AI-Ni-Ti, AI-Cr-Si, AI-Ni-Si, and AI-Ti-Si, where the occurrence of detrimental intermetallic phases needs to be precisely modeled in order to permit reliable predictions for higher order systems.

The successful development of superalloys over the last 60 years provides us with the engineering alloys for todays air travel as well as todays power generation. This development was mostly based on empirical research resulting in the 10+ elements compositions of modern superalloys. Because of the high complexity of these alloy systems increasingly computational design tools are employed to drive further alloy developement. Very powerful thermodynamic modeling software is available now and it becomes more and more clear, that the predicting power of such calculations for the constitution of higher order systems depends critically on the precision of the data on the binary and ternary subsystems involved. Thus, the present project generated high precision experimental data on these systems as well as closely matching thermodynamic models for them. Previous FWF funded research results involving the elements Cr,Ni,Ti,Si and C are extended to include the element aluminium. It is shown again, that just like in crystallography or microscopy increasing the precision of the data increases the resolution of the observations and allows new discoveries. The extended data base for these elements now comprises data for the ternary systems Al-Cr-Ni, the basic system for superalloys, as well as several others such as Ni-Ti-Si, Cr-Ni-Ti, Al-Cr-Ti, Al-Ni-Ti, Al-Cr-Si, Al-Ni-Si, and Al-Ti-Si, where the occurrence of detrimental intermetallic phases now can be precisely modeled in order to permit reliable predictions for higher order systems.