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

Award ID: 2208777

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.

NSF Program Director: Ela Mirowski