In the past two decades, metallic additive manufacturing has been flourishingly developed as a disruptive manufacturing process for providing sophisticated geometry of the component, owing to its layer-by-layer building manner. The metallic 3D printing technique offers great advantages to manufacturing efficiency and design flexibility.
However, only a few alloys are available in the materials portfolio for metallic 3D printing, which apparently impeded further applications. Nickel-based superalloys are widely used in the critical component service at the elevated temperature, owing to its extraordinary combination of heat-resistant mechanical and chemical properties. Driven by the more and more demanding working environment, the advanced designed superalloy parts are of great interest and significance. For example, the turbine components with complex hollow internal cooling systems are well expected to be fabricated with 3D printing. While what hinders the implementation of this technique on superalloy is the high cracking susceptibility during processing, especially for precipitation strengthened nickel-based superalloy.
In Jinghao’s research, the alloy design approaches based on physics-based additive manufacturability model, PHAse COMPutation (PHACOMP), and CALculation of PHAse Diagrams (CALPHAD) methods will be carried out for the alloy selection from almost 1,000,000 candidates. Beyond, the new alloy will be 3D printed and examined by both advanced microstructure characterization and mechanical properties evaluation.
