Use of Laser Welding for Fabrication of Nickel Based Superalloy Aerostructures and Propulsion Components

Corvid Technologies (Corvid) in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory (PSU) will determine weld parameters and procedues necessary to carry out deep, repeatable, high strength laser welds of nickel based super alloys. Corvid will use an automated simulation toolkit capable of running large numbers of multiphysics simulations of the laser welding process to rapidly correlate weld parameter inputs with resulting weld properties. PSU will then refine and anchor these parameter sets by carrying out weld experiments and characterizing the resulting weld quality using advanced analytical techniques (optical microscopy, SEM, EBSD, EDS) and mechanical tests (tensile tests, hardness tests). Cycling data from simulations to experiments and back will be repeated until the weld parameter set is optimized. This simulation-experiment hybrid approach to predicting laser welding parameters will allow for the strength of both organizations to be leveraged such that the time and cost required to go from alloy selection to successfully laser welding that alloy in a production environment is drastically reduced.