Efficient Superalloy Ingot Breakdown

All major material suppliers use DEFORM to help understand and design their cogging process. From their perspective, they need to predict, control, and optimize the ingot breakdown process to achieve a desired microstructure. This work will answer that need by developing a DEFORM-integrated microstructure evolution model for the U720 ingot breakdown process. During Phase I, various microstructure models were investigated and numerical techniques to accelerate cogging simulations were evaluated. As a result, a preliminary Cellular Automata-based microstructure evolution model has been developed; cogging simulation times have been reduced up to 90%, and feasibility studies have succeeded in demonstrating the effectiveness of the inverse technique for both flow stress modeling and for the quantification of difficult-to-measure microstructure modeling parameters. Three additional tasks must be performed to combine these successes into a commercial product useful to industry, government, and academia. Thus, in cooperation with industrial partner ATI Allvac, Phase II proposed work will (1) pursue further microstructure model development, augmented with material testing; (2) integrate the microstructure model into DEFORM, and (3) validate the integrated DEFORM/microstructure module with an industrial cogging breakdown process, and demonstrate the inverse analysis technique to reduce the number of experiments necessary to characterize new materials.