Nickel Aluminum Bronze for Additive Manufacturing Alloy Development

QuesTek Innovations LLC, a leader in the field of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME), proposes to design and optimize a new Nickel Aluminum Bronze (NAB) alloy for use as feedstock material in directed energy deposition (DED)-based additive manufacturing (AM) in order to enable the development of AM technologies for quicker, cheaper, and more reliable production and repair of NAB-based components for naval seawater applications. Building off of initial benchmarking DED experiments on baseline NAB alloys, QuesTek will leverage mechanistic property models and computational process modeling tools to design feedstock compositions which will then be prototyped through small-lot wire production. Working with partners at Penn State University’s Applied Research Lab, QuesTek will perform wire-fed AM builds to optimize process parameters, validate alloy designs, and demonstrate performance of the designed feedstock materials. Rolls Royce Corporation, a tier-one supplier of NAB components to the Navy, will provide feedback and guidance on NAB components and property requirements. By the end of the Phase II period, QuesTek will demonstrate and test component-level AM builds produced using optimized wire feedstock.