Final Report Computer Aided Design of Advanced Turbine Airfoil Alloys for Industrial Gas Turbines in Coal Fired Environments. Report for September 1, 2004 to December 31, 2007.
Recent initiatives for fuel flexibility, increased efficiency and decreased emissions in power generating industrial gas turbines (IGTs), have highlighted the need for the development of techniques to produce large single crystal or columnar grained, directionally solidified Ni-base superalloy turbine blades and vanes. In order to address the technical difficulties of producing large single crystal components, a program has been initiated to, using computational materials science, better understand how alloy composition in potential IGT alloys and solidification conditions during processing, effect castability, defect formation and environmental resistance. This program will help to identify potential routes for the development of high strength, corrosion resistant airfoil/vane alloys, which would be a benefit to all IGTs, including small IGTs and even aerospace gas turbines. During the first year, collaboration with Siemens Power Corporation (SPC), Rolls-Royce, Howmet and Solar Turbines has identified and evaluated about 50 alloy compositions that are of interest for this potential application. In addition, alloy modifications to an existing alloy (CMSX-4) were also evaluated. Collaborating with SPC and using computational software at SPC to evaluate about 50 alloy compositions identified 5 candidate alloys for experimental evaluation. The results obtained from the experimentally determined phase transformation temperatures did not compare well to the calculated values in many cases. The effects of small additions of boundary strengtheners (i.e., C, B and N) to CMSX-4 were also examined. The calculated phase transformation temperatures were somewhat closer to the experimentally determined values than for the 5 candidate alloys, discussed above. The calculated partitioning coefficients were similar for all of the CMSX-4 alloys, similar to the experimentally determined segregation behavior. In general, it appears that computational materials science has become a useful tool to help reduce the number of iterations necessary to perform laboratory experiments or alloy development. However, we clearly are not able to rely solely on computational techniques in the development of high temperature materials for IGT applications. A significant amount of experimentation will continue to be required.
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