B. Grant

Inertia friction welds between nickel superalloy components: Analysis of residual stress by eigenstrain distributions

Machining, surface treatment, plastic forming and stretching, welding, and other manufacturing processes introduce residual stresses and distortion into work pieces and engineering components. These phenomena exert a significant influence on the behaviour of components affecting the response to thermal/mechanical in-service loading, e.g. in terms of crack initiation and propagation under the conditions of creep and fatigue, thus ultimately affecting their durability. In the present study, the inertia friction welding process is considered that is used for butt joining of hollow cylindrical components, such as shafts and drums. An inverse eigenstrain framework is used for the interpretation of neutron diffraction measurements in terms of the underlying eigenstrain distributions. Eigenstrain distributions that describe the nature of permanent inelastic deformation are found by minimizing the sum-of-squares measure of the disagreement between model prediction and experimental measurements of residual elastic strains. Experimental data obtained from neutron diffraction measurements are used in an inverse solution scheme in order to determine the underlying eigenstrain (strains permanently ‘locked in’) that give rise to the residual stress state. Once these are found, approximate reconstruction of the complete stress tensor within the entire component becomes straightforward. Eigenstrain distributions are first obtained for reduced size test specimens which have been characterized in detail using neutron diffraction. Subsequently, the eigenstrain distributions are scaled and applied to more complex, full-size real engine components, with scaling factors adjusted to match surface hole drilling measurements.

The Effect of Lattice Misfit on Deformation Mechanisms at High Temperature

Understanding the relationship between deformation mechanisms and microstructure is essential if one wants to fully exploit the potential of advanced nickel base superalloys and develop future alloys. In the present work, the influence of the lattice misfit between  and ’ has been studied by means of in-situ loading experiments using neutron diffraction in combination with crystal plasticity modelling on RR1000 and Alloy 720Li. Both alloys were processed to generate three simplified uni-modal γ’ microstructures to allow determination of γ’ responses and experiments were carried out at 750°C. The results showed that a positive misfit strain increases the level of load partitioning from  to ’ during plastic deformation introduced by uniaxial tensile loading.

A comparison of strain measurements on an inertia friction weld using the ENGIN-X and SALSA neutron strain mapping instruments

In this study we present a direct comparison between residual strain measurements carried out on the same inertia friction weld using ENGIN-X at ISIS, UK and the new strain scanner SALSA at ILL, France. ENGIN-X is a time of flight (TOF) instrument, which receives neutrons from a neutron spallation source, while the SALSA Strain-Imager, a high resolution diffractometer, is based at a research reactor source with a continuous neutron flux and is operated with a constant wavelength. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate a confidence in crosscomparing future strain measurements to be performed at ENGIN-X and SALSA. Measurements were carried out on medium size inertia friction welded nickel superalloy test-piece, which show no significant crystallographic texture across the weld line. The results demonstrate that, even though residual stresses determined on SALSA only rely on a single peak analysis (in this case the (111) reflection), the results show excellent agreement with the measurements carried out on ENGIN-X, where strain is determined from multi-peak Rietveld analysis.