Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2003--Aachen.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2004--Darmstadt.

High strength nickel-base superalloys have been used in turbine blades for many years because of their superior performance at high temperatures. In such environments superalloys have limited oxidation and corrosion resistance and to solve this problem, protective coatings are deposited on the surface. The positive effect of coatings is based on protecting the surface zone in contact with hot gas atmosphere with a thermodynamically stable oxide layer that acts as a diffusion barrier. During service life, mechanical properties of metallic coatings can be changed due to the significant interdiffusion between substrate and coating. There are also other degradation mechanisms that affect nickel-base superalloys such as low cycle fatigue, thermo-mechanical fatigue and creep. The focus of this work is on a study of low cycle fatigue and out-of-phase thermo-mechanical fatigue behaviour of three uncoated and coated nickel-base superalloys. Polycrystalline IN792 and two single crystals CMSX-4 and SCB were coated with four different coatings; an overlay coating AMDRY997 (NiCoCrAlYTa), a platinum aluminide modified diffusion coating RT22 and two innovative coatings with a NiW interdiffusion barrier in the interface called IC1 and IC3. A low cycle fatigue and thermo-mechanical fatigue device was designed and set-up to simulate service loading of turbine blades and vanes. The low cycle fatigue tests were run at 500oC and 900oC while the thermo-mechanical fatigue tests were run between 250oC and 900oC.To simulate long service life, some coated specimens were exposed at 1050oC for 2000 h before the tests. The main conclusions are that the presence of the coatings is, in most cases, detrimental to LCF lives of the superalloys at 500oC while the coatings do improve the LCF lives of the superalloys at 900oC. Under TMF loading conditions, the coatings have negative effect on the lifetime of IN792. On single crystals, they are found to improve TMF life of the superalloys, especially at lower strains. The tests also indicate that long-term aging influences the fatigue and fracture behaviour of coated superalloys by oxidation and diffusion mechanisms when compared to non-aged specimens. The aged specimens exhibit longer life in some cases and shorter life during other test conditions. Fatigue cracks were in most cases initiated at the surface of the coatings, growing transgranularly perpendicular to the load axis.

Scanning Laser Epitaxy (SLE) is a new layer-by-layer additive manufacturing process being developed in the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory at Georgia Tech. SLE allows for the fabrication of three-dimensional objects with specified microstructure through the controlled melting and re-solidification of a metal powder placed atop a base substrate. This dissertation discusses the work done to date on assessing the feasibility of using SLE to both repair single crystal (SX) turbine airfoils and manufacture functionally graded turbine components. Current processes such as selective laser melting (SLM) are not able to create structures with defined microstructure and often have issues with warping of underlying layers due to the high temperature gradients present when scanning a high power laser beam. Additionally, other methods of repair and buildup have typically been plagued by crack formation, equiaxed grains, stray grains, and grain multiplication that can occur when dendrite arms are separated from their main dendrites due to remelting. In this work, it is shown that the SLE process is capable of creating fully dense, crack-free equiaxed, directionally-solidified, and SX structures. The SLE process, though, is found to be currently constrained by the cumbersome method of choosing proper parameters and a relative lack of repeatability. Therefore, it is hypothesized that a real-time feedback control scheme based upon a robust offline model will be necessary both to create specified defect-free microstructures and to improve the repeatability of the process enough to allow for multi-layer growth. The proposed control schemes are based upon temperature data feedback provided at high frame rate by a thermal imaging camera. This data is used in both PID and model reference adaptive control (MRAC) schemes and drives the melt pool temperature during processing towards a reference melt pool temperature that has been found to give a desired microstructure in the robust offline model of the process. The real-time control schemes will enable the ground breaking capabilities of the SLE process to create engine-ready net shape turbine components from raw powder material.