Abstract
Developing affordable and light high-temperature materials alternative to Ni-base superalloys has significantly increased the efforts in designing advanced ferritic superalloys. However, currently developed ferritic superalloys still exhibit low high-temperature strengths, which limits their usage. Here we use a CALPHAD-based high-throughput computational method to design light, strong, and low-cost high-entropy alloys for elevated-temperature applications. Through the high-throughput screening, precipitation-strengthened lightweight high-entropy alloys are discovered from thousands of initial compositions, which exhibit enhanced strengths compared to other counterparts at room and elevated temperatures. The experimental and theoretical understanding of both successful and failed cases in their strengthening mechanisms and order-disorder transitions further improves the accuracy of the thermodynamic database of the discovered alloy system. This study shows that integrating high-throughput screening, multiscale modeling, and experimental validation proves to be efficient and useful in accelerating the discovery of advanced precipitation-strengthened structural materials tuned by the high-entropy alloy concept.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 4329 |
Journal | Nature Communications |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2021 |
Funding
P.K.L. and R.F. very much appreciate the supports from (1) the National Science Foundation (DMR-1611180 and 1809640) with program directors, Drs. J. Yang, G. Shiflet, and D. Farkas and (2) the US Army Research Office (W911NF-13-1-0438 and W911NF-19–2-0049) with program managers, Drs. M.P. Bakas, S.N. Mathaudhu, and D. M. Stepp. M.C.G. acknowledges the support of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Fossil Energy Cross-Cutting Technologies Program at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) under the RSS contract, 89243318CFE000003. M.W. was supported through the DOE grant, SC-0014506, for the development of simulation methods. APT was conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), which is a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility. The neutron-scattering work was carried out at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), which is the U.S. DOE user facility at ORNL, sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. The authors thank James Burns for his assistance in performing the APT sample preparation and running the APT experiments.