Thesis (Sc.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND SCIENCE. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Ronald George Ballinger. / Sc.D.

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.

Thermomechanical fatigue life prediction is important in the design of Ni-base superalloy components in gas turbine engines and requires a stress-strain analysis for accurate results. Crystal viscoplasticity models are an ideal tool for this stress-strain analysis of Ni-base superalloys as they can capture not only the anomalous yielding behavior, but also the non-Schmid effect, the strain rate dependence, and the temperature dependence of typically large grained directionally-solidified and single crystal alloys. However, the model is difficult to calibrate even for isothermal conditions because of the interdependencies between parameters meant to capture different but similar phenomena at different length scales, many tied to a particular slip system. The need for the capacity to predict the material response over a large temperature range, which is critical for the simulation of hot section gas turbine components, causes the determination of parameters to be even more difficult since some parameters are highly temperature dependent. Rapid parameter determination techniques are therefore needed for temperature-dependent parameterizations so that the effort needed to calibrate the model is reduced to a reasonable level. Specific parameter determination protocols are established for a crystal viscoplasticity model implemented in ABAQUS through a user material subroutine. Parameters are grouped to reduce interdependencies and a hierarchical path through the groups and the parameters within each group is established. This dual level hierarchy creates a logical path for parameter determination which further reduces the interdependencies between parameters, allowing for rapid parameter determination. Next, experiments and protocols are established to rapidly provide data for calibration of the temperature-dependencies of the viscoplasticity. The amount of data needed to calibrate the crystal viscoplasticity model over a wide temperature range is excessively large due to the number of parameters that it contains which causes the amount of time spent in the experimentation phase of parameter determination to be excessively large. To avoid this lengthy experimentation phase each experiment is designed to contain as much relevant data as possible. This is accomplished through the inclusion of multiple strain rates in each experiment with strain ranges sufficiently large to clearly capture the inelastic response. The experimental and parameter determination protocols were exercised by calibrating the model to the directionally-solidified Ni-bas superalloy DS-CM247LC. The resulting calibration describes the material's behavior in multiple loading orientations and over a wide temperature range of 20 °C to 1050 °C. Several parametric studies illustrate the utility of the calibrated model.