GOALI: / DMREF: Multimodal design of revolutionary additive-enabled oxide dispersion strengthened superalloys

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) project will develop new knowledge and strategies for creating metallic materials for ultra-high temperature applications. These applications are critical for improving the efficiency of jet engines in aerospace and turbines for land-based power plants, and will also lead to reduction of harmful carbon emissions. The new materials to be created and studied are based on the concept that metals can be reinforced by uniformly distributing a small amount of ceramic oxide phases throughout the metallic matrix. The presence of the oxide reinforcements can provide significant enhancement in strength and help protect the material against attack under harsh, high temperature environments. A new way to create these oxide-dispersion-strengthened (ODS) metal alloys will be pursued, using an approach pioneered by our collaborators at NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC). In this “additive manufacturing” approach, a moving laser melts and solidifies the metal and oxide powder, building up the material layer-by-layer. The project will further improve these materials by using additional strategies for strengthening the metals. New knowledge about the interaction between this new processing strategy, the resultant internal structure of the alloy, and mechanical behavior of these new materials will be generated in the project, and this knowledge will be made accessible using a new artificial-intelligence framework. This framework will enable the team to the optimize these additive ODS alloys for design objectives of interest to our partners at GE Aerospace and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The DMREF team includes 3 women and 1 black faculty member and will offer multiple opportunities for student research experiences targeting under-represented groups and veterans. This project will develop new knowledge and strategies for creating a new class of metallic materials for a wide range of demanding applications in aerospace and power generation. A novel additive-processing route for creating oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) metallic alloys, recently developed by collaborators at NASA GRC, will be utilized to design superalloys with exceptional high temperature properties. This new additive ODS process enables the synthesis of ODS alloys in a single, additive processing step, thereby bypassing the conventional mechanical alloying process that is time-intensive and inconsistent with scale-up manufacturing. The team also includes collaborators at GE Aerospace and the Air Force Research Laboratory, and seeks to meld the new additive ODS process with superalloy design principles by employing precipitate strengthening in order to enhance strength and oxidation resistance across multiple temperature regimes. A novel microstructure based machine learning (ML) framework, will be utilized to: (a) represent multiscale microstructure in a comprehensive manner, (b) develop property/processing linkages, and (c) accelerate the iterative design of new additive ODS alloys. The ML framework will be informed by an extensive suite of experiments used to generate multiscale multimodal microstructure quantification, evaluate the mechanical and oxidation behavior, and develop a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms behind the unique properties of these alloys. This approach will enable optimization of the additive ODS alloys across two design objectives of interest to our partners, including (1) intermediate/high temperatures for long lifetime applications where strength and microstructure stability are of utmost importance, and (2) extreme temperature applications where maintaining strength and structural integrity of rapidly evolving microstructures is only required for short time scales. The additive ODS processing route opens the door to rapid assessment of alloy behavior, enabling for the first time the use of effective ML approaches for alloy-microstructure-property optimization of novel ODS alloys. 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.