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Comparative Coarsening Kinetics of Gamma Prime Precipitates in Nickel and Cobalt Base Superalloys
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The increasing technological need to push service conditions of structural materials to higher temperatures has motivated the development of several alloy systems. Among them, superalloys are an excellent candidate for high temperature applications because of their ability to form coherent ordered precipitates, which enable the retention of high strength close to their melting temperature. The accelerated kinetics of solute diffusion, with or without an added component of mechanical stress, leads to coarsening of the precipitates, and results in microstructural degradation, limiting the durability of the materials. Hence, the coarsening of precipitates has been a classical research problem for these alloys in service. The prolonged hunt for an alternative of nickel base superalloys with superior traits has gained hope after the recent discovery of Co-Al-W based alloys, which readily form high temperature g precipitates, similar to Ni base superalloys. In the present study, coarsening behavior of g precipitates in Co-10Al-10W (at. %) has been carried out at 800°C and 900°C. This study has, for the first time, obtained critical coarsening parameters in cobalt-base alloys. Apart from this, it has incorporated atomic scale compositional information across the g/g interfaces into classical Cahn-Hilliard model for a better model of coarsening kinetics. The coarsening study of g precipitates in Ni-14Al-7 Cr (at. %) has shown the importance of temporal evolution of the compositional width of the g/g interfaces to the coarsening kinetics of g precipitates. This study has introduced a novel, reproducible characterization method of crystallographic study of ordered phase by coupling of orientation microscopy with atom probe tomography (APT). Along with the detailed analysis of field evaporation behaviors of Ni and Co superalloys in APT, the present study determines the site occupancy of various solutes within ordered g precipitates in both Ni and Co superalloys. This study has explained the role of structural …