Recent research progress in the mechanism and suppression of fusion welding-induced liquation cracking of nickel based superalloys

Nickel-based superalloys are extensively used in the crucial hot-section components of industrial gas turbines,aeronautics,and astronautics because of their excellent mechanical properties and corrosion resistance at high temperatures.Fusion welding serves as an effective means for joining and repairing these alloys;however,fusion welding-induced liquation cracking has been a challenging issue.This paper comprehensively reviewed recent liquation cracking,discussing the formation mechanisms,cracking criteria,and remedies.In recent investigations,regulating material composition,changing the preweld heat treatment of the base metal,optimizing the welding process parameters,and applying auxiliary control methods are effective strategies for mitigating cracks.To promote the application of nickel-based superalloys,further research on the combination impact of multiple elements on cracking prevention and specific quantitative criteria for liquation cracking is necessary.

Effects of orientation on the fatigue crack growth behaviors of the ZK60 magnesium alloy in air and PBS

Strong anisotropic corrosion and mechanical properties caused by specimen orientations greatly limit the applications of wrought magnesium alloys.To investigate the influences of specimen orientation,the corrosion tests and(corrosion)fatigue crack growth tests were conducted.The rolled and transverse surfaces of the materials show distinct corrosion rate differences in the stable corrosion stage,but the truth is the opposite for the initial stage of corrosion.In air,specimen orientations have a significant influence on the plastic deformation mechanisms near the crack tip,which results in different fatigue fracture surfaces and cracking paths.Compared with R-T specimens,N-T specimens show a slower fatigue crack growth(FCG)rate in air,which can be attributed to crack closure effects and deformation twinning near the crack tip.The corrosion environment will not significantly change the main plastic deformation mechanisms for the same type of specimen.However,the FCG rate in phosphate buffer saline(PBS)is one order of magnitude higher than that in air,which is caused by the combined effects of hydrogen-induced cracking and anodic dissolution.Owing to the similar corrosion rates at crack tips,the specimens with different orientations display close FCG rates in PBS.

Cracking on a nickel-based superalloy fabricated by direct energy deposition

Cracks have consistently been a significant challenge limiting the development of additive manufactured nickel-based superalloys.It is essential to investigate the location of cracks and their forming mechanism.This study extensively examines the impact of solidification process,microstructural evolution,and stress concentration on crack initiation during direct energy deposition(DED).The results emphasize that the crack formation is significantly related to large-angle grain boundaries,rapid cooling rates.Cracks caused by large-angle grain boundaries and a fast-cooling rate predominantly appear near the edge of the deposited samples.Liquation cracks are more likely to form near the top of the deposited sample,due to the presence ofγ/γ'eutectics.The secondary dendritic arm and the carbides in the interdendritic regions can obstruct liquid flow during the final stage of solidification,which results in the formation of solidification cracks and voids.This work paves the way to avoid cracks in nickel-based superalloys fabricated by DED,thereby enhancing the performance of superalloys.

Evolution model and failure mechanisms of rainfall-induced cracked red clay slopes:insights from Xinshao County,China

Red clay landslides are widely distributed worldwide,resulting in severe loss of life and property.Although rainfall-induced red clay slopes have received extensive attention,the role of cracks in the evolutionary process of red clay slopes and their connection to failure mechanisms is still poorly understood.A comprehensive approach integrating field investigation,laboratory tests,and numerical simulations was conducted to study the 168 red clay landslides in Xinshao County,China.The results show that red clay is prone to forming cracks at high moisture content due to its low swelling and high shrinkage properties.The failure mode of red clay slopes can be summarized in three stages:crack generation,slope excavation,and slope failure.Furthermore,the retrospective analysis and numerical simulations of the typical landslide in Guanchong indicated that intense rainfall primarily impacts the shallow layer of soil within approximately 0.5 m on the intact slope.However,cracks change the pattern of rainfall infiltration in the slope.Rainwater infiltrates rapidly through the preferential channels induced by the cracks rather than uniformly and slowly from the slope surface.This results in a significant increase in both the depth of infiltration and the saturated zone area of the cracked slope,reaching 3.8 m and 36.2 m^(2),respectively.Consequently,the factor of safety of the slope decreases by 13.4%compared to the intact slope,ultimately triggering landslides.This study can provide valuable insights into understanding the failure mechanisms of red clay slopes in China and other regions with similar geological settings.

Effect of icosahedral phase formation on the stress corrosion cracking(SCC)behaviors of the as-cast Mg-8%Li(in wt.%)based alloys

Through exploring the stress corrosion cracking(SCC)behaviors of the as-cast Mg-8%Li and Mg-8%Li-6%Zn-1.2%Y alloys in a 0.1 M NaCl solution,it revealed that the SCC susceptibility index(I_(SCC))of the Mg-8%Li alloy was 47%,whilst the I_(SCC)of the Mg-8%Li-6%Zn-1.2%Y alloy was 68%.Surface,cross-sectional and fractography observations indicated that for the Mg-8%Li alloy,theα-Mg/β-Li interfaces acted as the preferential crack initiation sites and propagation paths during the SCC process.With regard to the Mg-8%Li-6%Zn-1.2%Y alloy,the crack initiation sites included the I-phase and the interfaces of I-phase/β-Li andα-Mg/β-Li,and the preferential propagation paths were the I-phase/β-Li andα-Mg/β-Li interfaces.Moreover,the SCC of the two alloys was concerned with hydrogen embrittlement(HE)mechanism.

Thermally-induced cracking behaviors of coal reservoirs subjected to cryogenic liquid nitrogen shock

The benefits of using cryogenic liquid nitrogen shock to enhance coal permeability have been confirmed from experimental perspectives.In this paper,we develop a fully coupled thermo-elastic model in combination with the strain-based isotropic damage theory to uncover the cooling-dominated cracking behaviors through three typical cases,i.e.coal reservoirs containing a wellbore,a primary fracture,and a natural fracture network,respectively.The progressive cracking processes,from thermal fracture initiation,propagation or cessation,deflection,bifurcation to multi-fracture interactions,can be well captured by the numerical model.It is observed that two hierarchical levels of thermal fractures are formed,in which the number of shorter thermal fractures consistently exceeds that of the longer ones.The effects of coal properties related to thermal stress levels and thermal diffusivity on the fracture morphology are quantified by the fracture fractal dimension and the statistical fracture number.The induced fracture morphology is most sensitive to changes in the elastic modulus and thermal expansion coefficient,both of which dominate the complexity of the fracture networks.Coal reservoir candidates with preferred thermal-mechanical properties are also recommended for improving the stimulation effect.Further findings are that there exists a critical injection temperature and a critical in-situ stress difference,above which no thermal fractures would be formed.Preexisting natural fractures with higher density and preferred orientations are also essential for the formation of complex fracture networks.The obtained results can provide some theoretical support for cryogenic fracturing design in coal reservoirs.

Simulation-Based Investigation of Crack Formation in Forged MB15 Magnesium Alloy

In the process of riveting an MB15 forging die,cracks were discovered emerging along the longitudinal direction and near the riveting hole.Through fracture analysis,microscopic observation,energy spectrum analysis,metallographic examination,and hardness test,the properties and causes of the cracks are discussed.The results indicate that the cracking type is intergranular brittle cracking,occurring during the forging stage.Furthermore,the recrystallization at the crack site is found to be incomplete,which is attributed to the low deformation temperature.

Additive manufacturing of Ni-based superalloys: Residual stress, mechanisms of crack formation and strategies for crack inhibition

The additive manufacturing(AM)of Ni-based superalloys has attracted extensive interest from both academia and industry due to its unique capabilities to fabricate complex and high-performance components for use in high-end industrial systems.However,the intense temperature gradient induced by the rapid heating and cooling processes of AM can generate high levels of residual stress and metastable chemical and structural states,inevitably leading to severe metallurgical defects in Ni-based superalloys.Cracks are the greatest threat to these materials’integrity as they can rapidly propagate and thereby cause sudden and non-predictable failure.Consequently,there is a need for a deeper understanding of residual stress and cracking mechanisms in additively manufactured Ni-based superalloys and ways to potentially prevent cracking,as this knowledge will enable the wider application of these unique materials.To this end,this paper comprehensively reviews the residual stress and the various mechanisms of crack formation in Ni-based superalloys during AM.In addition,several common methods for inhibiting crack formation are presented to assist the research community to develop methods for the fabrication of crack-free additively manufactured components.

Effect of particle size of single-crystalline hierarchical ZSM-5 on its surface mass transfer in n-heptane catalytic cracking

Single-crystalline hierarchical ZSM-5 zeolites with different particle sizes(namely 100,140,and 200 nm)were successfully prepared by adjusting the amount of tetrapropylammonium hydroxide(TPAOH),and investigated in n-heptane catalytic cracking reaction.Diffusional measurements by zero-length column(ZLC)method showed that the apparent diffusivities of n-heptane decreased with the reduction of particle size,indicating the existence of surface barriers.Moreover,with the decrease of particle size,the additional diffusion path length increased,which meant the influence of surface barriers became more apparent.Despite the change of surface barriers,the intracrystalline diffusion still dominated the overall diffusion.Catalytic performance showed that the zeolite with smaller particle size had better stability.

Comparison on crack propagation under tension at 150℃ of Mg-2Zn-1.5Mn alloy sheets with and without crack notch

Generally,edge crack of rolled magnesium alloy sheets initiates in the RD(rolling direction)-ND(normal direction)plane and then propagate in the RD-TD(transverse direction)plane.Hence,the Mg-2Zn-1.5Mn(ZM21)alloy sheets with and without crack notch were designed to carry out in-situ tensile experiments under 150℃(the same temperature of rolling),with the aim to understand their crack propagation mechanism.The scanning electron microscopy(SEM)and electron backscattered diffraction(EBSD)techniques were utilized to reveal microstructural evolution in real time at designated displacements.The results show that the prismatic slip,basal slip,and extension twining play synergistic role in coordinating strain during the tensile process in ZM21 alloy sheet at 150℃.In both tensile samples with and without crack notch,localized strain is mainly concentrated at relatively fine grain area and the grain boundaries or triple junctions of the grains with large basal Schmid factor(SF)difference,which eventually leads to severe surface roughening and subsequent crack initiation.Compared with the sample without crack notch,the pre-cracked sample exhibits severer deformation at the crack tip due to strain concentration.Strain gradient distribution is observed at the crack tip region in the pre-cracked sample.The crack propagation path of the sample with pre-crack is identified and the underlying mechanism is also discussed.

Stress corrosion cracking of magnesium alloys:A review

Magnesium(Mg)alloys have been widely used in automobile,aviation,computer,and other fields due to their lightweight,high specific strength and stiffness,low pollution,and good electromagnetic shielding performance.However,the chemical stability of Mg alloys is poor,especially in the corrosive medium environment with high stress corrosion sensitivity,which causes sudden damage to structural components and restricts their application field.In recent years,owing to the increasing failure rate of engineering structures caused by stress corrosion of Mg alloys,it has become necessary to understand and pay more attention to the stress corrosion cracking(SCC)behavior of Mg alloys.In this paper,the SCC mechanisms and test methods of Mg alloys have been summarized.The recent research progress on SCC of Mg alloys has been reviewed from the aspects of alloying,preparation process,surface modification,corrosive medium,and strain rate.More importantly,future research trends in the field of SCC of Mg alloys have also been proposed.

Boundary Element Analysis forModeⅢCrack Problems of Thin-Walled Structures from Micro-to Nano-Scales

This paper develops a new numerical framework for modeⅢcrack problems of thin-walled structures by integrating multiple advanced techniques in the boundary element literature.The details of special crack-tip elements for displacement and stress are derived.An exponential transformation technique is introduced to accurately calculate the nearly singular integral,which is the key task of the boundary element simulation of thin-walled structures.Three numerical experiments with different types of cracks are provided to verify the performance of the present numerical framework.Numerical results demonstrate that the present scheme is valid for modeⅢcrack problems of thin-walled structures with the thickness-to-length ratio in the microscale,even nanoscale,regime.

Bridge Crack Segmentation Method Based on Parallel Attention Mechanism and Multi-Scale Features Fusion

Regular inspection of bridge cracks is crucial to bridge maintenance and repair.The traditional manual crack detection methods are timeconsuming,dangerous and subjective.At the same time,for the existing mainstream vision-based automatic crack detection algorithms,it is challenging to detect fine cracks and balance the detection accuracy and speed.Therefore,this paper proposes a new bridge crack segmentationmethod based on parallel attention mechanism and multi-scale features fusion on top of the DeeplabV3+network framework.First,the improved lightweight MobileNetv2 network and dilated separable convolution are integrated into the original DeeplabV3+network to improve the original backbone network Xception and atrous spatial pyramid pooling(ASPP)module,respectively,dramatically reducing the number of parameters in the network and accelerates the training and prediction speed of the model.Moreover,we introduce the parallel attention mechanism into the encoding and decoding stages.The attention to the crack regions can be enhanced from the aspects of both channel and spatial parts and significantly suppress the interference of various noises.Finally,we further improve the detection performance of the model for fine cracks by introducing a multi-scale features fusion module.Our research results are validated on the self-made dataset.The experiments show that our method is more accurate than other methods.Its intersection of union(IoU)and F1-score(F1)are increased to 77.96%and 87.57%,respectively.In addition,the number of parameters is only 4.10M,which is much smaller than the original network;also,the frames per second(FPS)is increased to 15 frames/s.The results prove that the proposed method fits well the requirements of rapid and accurate detection of bridge cracks and is superior to other methods.

Edge crack damage analysis of AZ31 magnesium alloy hot-rolled plate improved by vertical roll pre-rolling

In the present study,through vertical roll pre-rolling of AZ31 magnesium alloy hot-rolled plate at room temperature,the effect of different vertical roll pre-rolling reduction on edge crack of the plate during flat rolling was systematically studied.The evolution of microstructure and texture in the edge and middle of the plate after vertical roll pre-rolling,heating and rolling was analyzed by using EBSD technology.The results show that during the vertical roll pre-rolling,{10–12}primary twins and{10–12}-{10–12}secondary twins dominated the edge deformation,while{10–12}primary twins dominated the middle deformation.With the increase of vertical roll pre-rolling reduction,the twin volume fraction of the edge and the middle increased,and the difference between them decreased gradually.After heating,the twin orientation caused by vertical roll pre-rolling was still maintained,and there was a significant difference in grain size between the edge and the middle.When the reduction rate of flat rolling was 30%,cracks have already appeared in the initial plate,while the vertical roll pre-rolled samples showed extremely high rolling performance.When the reduction rate of flat rolling was 50%,the 8PR sample still had no crack initiation.In addition,after flat rolling of 50%,the initial plate showed a strong basal texture,while the maximum pole density of the 8PR plate was small,and the texture distribution was very scattered,showing the characteristics of weak orientation.

Fatigue crack propagation of 7050 aluminum alloy FSW joints after surface peening

The surface composite modification of the 7050 aluminum alloy friction stir-welded joints was performed by shot peening(SP)/multiple rotation rolling(MRR)and MRR/SP,and the fatigue performance of the nugget zone(NZ)was investigated.The results demonstrated that the fatigue life of SP/MRR samples is longer than that of MRR/SP.On the plane 150μm below the surface.The grains with high angle grain boundary account for 71.5%and 34.3%for MRR/SP and SP/MRR samples,respectively.The crack propagation path of the MRR/SP is transgranular and intergranular,and it is intergranular for the MRR/SP.Multitudinous fatigue striations and some voids appeared at the fracture during the stable crack propagation stage.However,fatigue striations for SP/MRR are with smaller spacing,fewer holes,and smaller size under SP/MRR compared with fatigue fracture of MRR/SP.The differences in fatigue properties and fracture characteristics of the NZ are related to the microstructure after the two combined surface modifications.

Study on oxygen transport and titanium oxidation in coating cracks under parallel gas flow based on LBM modelling

The oxygen transportation from surrounding air to coating cracks is an important factor in the oxidation and ignition of titanium alloy. In this work, the oxygen transport and surface oxidation of titanium in inclined cracks of coating under parallel airflow are studied with the lattice Boltzmann method(LBM).A boundary scheme of LBM about surface reaction is developed. The conversion factors are utilized to build the relationship between the physical scale and the lattice scale. The reliability of the LBM model is validated by the finite element method(FEM). The results show that the convective mass transport driven by the surrounding airflow and the vortex structure formed inside the crack are the two significant factors that influence the oxygen transport in cracks. The convective mass transfer plays a major role in oxygen transport when the inclination angle of the crack is small. For the cases with a large inclination angle, the oxygen transfer from the top to the bottom of the crack is mainly controlled by mass diffusion mechanism. The oxygen concentration in inclined cracks is generally less than that in vertical cracks, and oxidation and ignition of the substrate titanium might be more likely to occur in relatively vertical cracks.

MAPPING THE DAMAGED ZONE AROUND THE CRACK TIP IN HIGH DENSITY POLYETHYLENE WITH SYNCHROTRON MICROFOCUS SMALL ANGLE X-RAY SCATTERING TECHNIQUE

The structural changes around a crack tip in a high density polyethylene were investigated by means of scanning synchrotron microfocus small-angle X-ray scattering technique. The scattering data confirm the process of craze structure development near a crack tip based on the evolution of voids. In addition, it was found that the main stress in the plastic zone near a crack tip exhibited a gradient distribution with respect to its strength and direction. The whole damaged area showed a strain distribution indicating a flow behavior toward the crack tip.

Gaps,challenges and possible solution for prediction of wheel-rail rolling contact fatigue crack initiation

The prediction of wheel/rail rolling contact fatigue(RCF)crack initiation during railway operations is an important task.Since RCF crack evolution is influenced by many factors,its prediction process is complex.This paper reviews the existing approaches to predict RCF crack initiation.The crack initiation region is predicted by the shakedown map.By combining the shakedown map with various initiation criteria and the critical plane method,the crack initiation life is calculated.The classification,methodologies,theories and applications of these approaches are included in this paper.The advantages and limitations of these methods are analyzed to provide recommendation for RCF crack initiation prediction.This review highlights that wheel/rail dynamic characteristic,complex working conditions,surface defects and wear all affect the RCF crack initiation.The optimal selection of criteria is essential in the crack initiation prediction.Based on the research gap regarding the challenging process of crack initiation prediction detailed in this review,a proposed prediction process of RCF crack initiation is proposed to achieve a more accurate result.

Computational Modeling of Intergranular Crack Propagation in an Intermetallic Compound Layer

A micromechanical model is presented to study the initiation and propagation of microcracks of intermetallic compounds(IMCs)in solder joints.The effects of the grain aggregate morphology,the grain boundary defects and the sensitivity of the various cohesive zone parameters in predicting the overall mechanical response are investigated.The overall strength is predominantly determined by the weak grain interfaces;both the grain aggregate morphology and the weak grain interfaces control the crack configuration;the different normal and tangential strengths of grain interfaces result in different intergranular cracking behaviors and play a critical role in determining the macroscopic mechanical response of the system.

Evaluation of roof cutting by directionally single cracking technique in automatic roadway formation for thick coal seam mining

Automatic roadway formation by roof cutting is a sustainable nonpillar mining method that has the potential to increase coal recovery,reduce roadway excavation and improve mining safety.In this method,roof cutting is the key process for stress relief,which significantly affects the stability of the formed roadway.This paper presents a directionally single cracking(DSC)technique for roof cutting with considerations of rock properties.The mechanism of the DSC technique was investi-gated by explicit finite element analyses.The DSC technique and roof cutting parameters were evaluated by discrete element simulation and field experiment.On this basis,the optimized DSC technique was tested in the field.The results indicate that the DSC technique could effectively control the blast-induced stress distribution and crack propagation in the roof rock,thus,achieve directionally single cracking on the roadway roof.The DsC technique for roof cutting with optimized parameters could effectively reduce the deformation and improve the stability of the formed roadway.Field engineering application verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the evaluated DSC technique for roof cutting.