Vision 20 Materials and Advanced Manufactured Components
The requirements for advanced gas turbine jet engines continue to evolve in order to improve operational efficiency through weight reduction and increased operating temperatures. This has led to the development of new high temperature materials for these applications. However, for any material that is to be considered, it is necessary to acquire a fundamental understanding of the associated creep properties. To perform a traditional creep assessment of any novel material can be expensive due to the relatively large volume of material usually required, in addition to the restricted material availability which is a typical hindrance in alloy development. As such, this has led to the utilisation of several miniature characterisation techniques for creep assessment, and in particular, the small punch (SP) creep test.
The SP test is a miniaturised mechanical testing method that can be used to obtain both creep and fracture data from relatively small quantities of experimental material. Since the advent of the Code of Practice for Small Punch Testing in 2006, increased attention has been paid to show that laboratory test data produced through SP testing is comparable to that acquired from conventional uniaxial creep assessment. Current research concentrates on the potential for SP testing as an effective tool for ranking both creep and monotonic properties of novel alloy variants and complex geometries produced through advanced manufacturing methods such as electron beam melting (EBM), blown powder deposition and metal injection moulding (MIM) where anisotropic mechanical responses may be expected due to interactions between processing and microstructure evolution.
Further reading:
- G. Norton, M.R. Bache, R. Hurst “Small Punch Creep Testing Applied to a Brittle Intermetallic Material”. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Small Scale Test Techniques, October 2-4th, 2012, Ostrava, Czech Republic.
- R.C. Hurst, R.J. Lancaster, G. Norton, R. Banik, M.R. Bache “A Renaissance in Small Punch Testing at Swansea University”. Proceedings of the IX Baltica Conference on Fast tools for condition and life assessment of power plants, June 11-13th 2013, Helsinki, Finland.