Modeling of epitaxial growth of single crystal superalloys fabricated by directed energy deposition

Abstract

Single crystal (SX) nickel-based superalloys have been used for turbine blades fabrication in recent years because of their superior mechanical performance at high temperature. The restoration of SX blades is significant considering the high cost to re-manufacture the blade. Directed energy deposition (DED), as a laser additive manufacturing technique, is a promising method for repairing the SX blades. Continuous epitaxial growth from the substrate to deposited layers is vital for successful restoration of SX blades. In this work, a novel single crystal texture cellular automata (SITCA) method is developed to simultaneously predict the columnar to equiaxed transition (CET) and crystal growth direction at the molten pool scale. Based on the grain envelope simplification, the SITCA method introduces a random variable to trace the growth trajectory, and therefore indicates the partition of the growth regions in the molten pool. A continuous nucleation model is introduced for nucleation simulation, and the crystal growth is simulated using the Kurz–Giovanola–Trivedi (KGT) model. The validation of SITCA model is performed by casting solidification cases under uniform temperature and uniform temperature gradient. The SITCA method is then integrated with a thermo-fluid molten pool simulation using finite element method to comprehensively compute the epitaxial growth. SX remelting experiments are carried out with different laser scanning speeds using a flat top laser source, and compared with the numerical results. The experimental and numerical results both indicate that increasing laser scanning speed will increase the ratio of crystals growing in the [001] direction while facilitate the CET on the other hand. This work shows the capacity of the SITCA method to predict epitaxial growth in DED process, and we anticipate to deploy the SITCA method to complex SX additive manufacturing.