Non-Destructive Grain Orientation Verification in Directionally Solidified Nickel Superalloy Turbine Blades by XRD

The verification of the primary and secondary grain orientation in directionally solified and single crystal nickel superalloy turbine blades is critically important to ensure quality and to meet the intended engineering requirements in the gas turbine engine. Unfortunately their is no affordable, commercially avaialble, whole-field technique for measuring grain orientations in turbine airfoils. This proposed project seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of a non-destructive method using x-ray diffraction techniques to affordably measure primary and secondary grain orientation in high stress locations of directionally solified turbine blades. Several turbine blades will be destructively analyzed to calibrate the methodology. A small number of blades will be inspected using advanced x-ray defraction techniques and statistical data analysis and management methods applied to establish the feasibility of the methodology.