Printable, High Strength, Burn Resistant Nickel Superalloy Designed using ICMD Software

High performance rocket engines use high pressure liquid oxygen fuel which can create a combustion reaction when exposed to common high strength nickel alloys. In these high-pressure combustion environments, there is a need for nickel-based superalloys that exhibit burn resistance, or oxygen compatibility, as well as high strength, two competing properties. Such an alloy also enables minimizing weight and maximizing thrust of rockets, which is particularly important for re-usable rockets where the degradation of materials must be minimized to reduce the need to replace components between launches.

With the recent progress toward industrialization of space travel, there are more rocket manufacturers than ever, and there is a need for flexible, fast, and supply chain resilient manufacturing paths such as Additive Manufacturing. With known tradeoffs between high pressure oxygen burn resistance, high strength, and printability for nickel-based superalloys due to a propensity for strain age cracking, achieving these three properties presents a complex alloy design scenario. Using the ICMD® platform, QuesTek has developed alloy concepts by co-optimizing these three key properties with physics-based ICME modeling. These alloys have been prototyped and tested, including advanced characterization of nano-scale microstructure to fine tune ICME model calibration to iterate on the alloy design.