Nickel aluminides: Breaking into the marketplace
Nurtured by ORNL researchers for almost 15 years, nickel aluminides may have found their niche. ORNL`s modified nickel aluminides are receiving considerable attention by the heat-treating industry in the United States and may have arrived just in the nick of time to make some companies more competitive. Nickel aluminides are intermetallic materials that have long been considered potentially useful because, thanks to their ordered crystal structure, they are very strong and hard and melt only at very high temperatures. But they had a serious weakness: they were too brittle to be shaped into reliable components. Then, in 1982, ORNL researchers led by Chain T. Liu in the Metals and Ceramics Division found the secret recipe for producing a ductile nickel aluminide alloy: add trace amounts of a few alloying elements in the right proportion. It was like turning peanut brittle into taffy. Their most important discovery was that the addition of a small amount of boron (200 parts per million) to a nickel aluminide alloy (Ni{sub 3}Al) makes the alloy highly ductile at room temperature. To address the safety concerns of the alloy preparation industry, Vinod Sikka and Joseph Vought developed a new process in collaboration with Seetharama Deevi, who was on a 1-year sabbatical at ORNL from the Research Center at Philip Morris in Richmond, Virginia. The development is called the Exo-Melt process.
- OSTI ID:
- 478906
- Journal Information:
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, Vol. 28, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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