Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In recent years, the demand for large size components used for critical components in transportation and energy industry has been continuously increasing. As a result, very large size ingots must be produced to respond to this demand. However, due to the large size of the ingots, chemically heterogeneous zones (macrosegregation) are produced which often cannot be eliminated during the subsequent heat treatment or forging operations leading to part non conformity and/or rejection. In the North American context, because of the fierce competition from emerging manufacturing countries, the continuous increase in energy costs, and more stringent environmental regulations, it is of critical importance for the ingot casting/forging industry to address this issue and develop methods and approaches that would allow producing large size ingots with no or little macrosegregation. To achieve this objective, a deep knowledge of the interactions between material characteristics (composition, microstructure, etc.) and process parameters in required. The development of such knowledge base manufacturing process is the key objective of the present Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) project. In collaboration with the industrial partner, the research will focus on investigating the micro mechanisms governing microstructure evolution during casting and solidification with special focus on challenges related to the development of new high strength alloys and large size ingots. Experimental study using advanced testing equipment will be conducted to develop material models describing the evolution of the microstructure. The developed material models will be implemented into Finite Element (FE) commercial codes to predict local microstructure heterogeneous zones and phase transformation characteristics in large size ingots. The research results will be validated ultimately at the industrial level.