China Foundry (Feb 2012)
Effect of cooling rate on MC carbide in directionally solidified nickel-based superalloy under high thermal gradient
Abstract
A series of directional solidification experiments have been performed to study the effect of cooling rate on the precipitation behavior of MC carbide in nickel-based superalloy under the temperature gradient of 500 K·s-1. Results reveal that the morphology of MC carbide changes from coarse block to fine strip, then to Chinese-script, and their sizes reduce gradually with the increasing of cooling rate from 2.53 K·s-1 to 36.4 K·s-1. At low cooling rates, most of these carbides are found to be located at the grain boundary and interdendritic regions, while the coupled growth of some carbides and γ matrix in the center of γ grains is occurred at high cooling rate. The main elements forming MC carbide are Ta, W, and Hf.
