Additive manufacturing of high-strength crack-free Ni-based Hastelloy X superalloy

By Quanquan Han, Yuchen Gu, R. Setchi, Franck Lacan, R. Johnston, S. Evans, Shoufeng Yang. Additive Manufacturing, 2019

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a proven additive manufacturing (AM) technology for producing metallic components with complex shapes using layer-by-layer manufacture principle. However, the fabrication of crack-free high-performance Ni-based superalloys such as Hastelloy X (HX) using LPBF technology remains a challenge because of these materials’ susceptibility to hot cracking. This paper addresses the above problem by proposing a novel method of introducing 1 wt.% titanium carbide (TiC) nanoparticles. The findings reveal that the addition of TiC nanoparticles results in the elimination of microcracks in the LPBF-fabricated enhanced HX samples; i.e. the 0.65% microcracks that were formed in the as-fabricated original HX were eliminated in the as-fabricated enhanced HX, despite the 0.14% residual pores formed. It also contributes to a 21.8% increase in low-angle grain boundaries (LAGBs) and a 98 MPa increase in yield strength. The study revealed that segregated carbides were unable to trigger hot cracking without sufficient thermal residual stresses; the significantly increased subgrains and low-angle grain boundaries played a key role in the hot cracking elimination. These findings offer a new perspective on the elimination of hot cracking of nickel-based superalloys and other industrially relevant crack-susceptible alloys. The findings also have significant implications for the design of new alloys, particularly for high-temperature industrial applications.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9672a055f5a4c6268e238fb2230de7402b2b3668