Effect of Temperature Dropping during Solution Treatment in Rejuvenation Heat Treatment and its Long-Term Heating Simulation on Microstructures of Nickel Base Alloy, Udimet 520

Abstract

Udimet 520 is a low precipitation strengthened nickel-based superalloy, which was designed and developed to be gas turbine blades at elevated temperatures. However, after long-term service under high stresses and temperatures, the microstructure of the turbine blades could be continually degraded. Therefore, the mechanical properties could be worse than the new ones. The rejuvenation heat treatment of degraded turbine blades, which were made of cast Udimet 520, was following by solution treatment at 1,121oC / 4 hours and then double aging processes including primary aging at 843 oC / 24 hours and secondary aging at 760oC / 16 hours, respectively. However, in practical reheat treatment processes, the temperature during solution treatment could be dropped by error or malfunction of high temperature heating furnace because the furnace has to be operated continually at very high temperature for very long time resulting in final reheat treated microstructures in many nickel base superalloys. To simulate this effect, the droppings of temperature during solution treatment are chosen and performed for 3 levels; 840oC, 800oC and 760oC, which could happen in practical working then heated up again immediately to solution temperature level. The maximum number of temperature dropping during the single solution treatment is up to 3 times. Received results show that the effect of temperature dropping during solution treatment has influenced on the final rejuvenated microstructures slightly due to the low precipitation behavior of the alloy. The long term heating at 800oC and 900oC / 1000 hours provided much effect in gamma prime particle coarsening.