Material Manufacturing for Harsh Environments

Why do we need advanced materials?

Energy producing industries and energy-intensive technologies need advanced materials that can reliably operate in harsh environments and during high service times or duty cycles.

  • Energy-intensive technologies:
  • Turbines (gas, steam, hydro, etc.)
  • Furnaces
  • Heat recovery systems
  • Nuclear reactors
  • Drilling equipment (oil and gas)
  • Chemical/refining processes (Oil, gas, manufacturing, steel, etc.)

What is a Harsh Environment?

​A harsh environment features external conditions where materials or parts struggle to survive or operate in a normal manner. These external conditions can be extreme temperatures, pressures, corrosive chemicals, radioactivity, mechanical forces, etc.

What is Sintering?

Sintering is the process of heating and compacting particles into a single solid structure without melting the particles.

INL specializes in the development of electric field assisted sintering (EFAS), also known as spark plasma sintering (SPS), technologies. EFAS is an advanced manufacturing technique for consolidating powder materials into solid parts. Compared to conventional methods such as furnaces or hot isostatic pressing (HIP), EFAS demonstrates 75-90% reductions in energy usage and processing time compared to similar operations.​

Capabilities

Experimental

From the production of parts on an industrially relevant scale to probing single particle interactions during EFAS, INL has the full suite of resources and expertise to advance the science and leverage EFAS to develop new advanced materials and de-risk industry adoption of this advanced manufacturing process.

EFAS can process materials from room temperature up to 2,500 degrees Celsius (4,532°F) while simultaneously applying up to 800 tons of load on our largest device. EFAS uses joule heating to heat the sample-mold ensemble 70% faster than hot pressing. It leverages density in the sample and tooling to process difficult-to-consolidate materials, such as refractory metals, carbides, nitrides, borides and oxides. Additionally, it can process composite materials and perform unique joining operations.

DCS-800

INL is home to the DCS-800, the world’s largest format, experimentally available EFAS system, with ram (piston) diameters of over half a meter and capable of operating at a peak temperature of 2,500°C (4,532°F) and pressures of up to 800 tons, with peak current reaching 150,000 Amps.

For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

INL’s Radiological EFAS system is engineered for fabricating ceramic and metallic composite fuels composed of radioactive elements and materials such as lanthanides, actinides and transuranic materials. It is enclosed inside a glovebox making it useful for air sensitive work such as nuclear fuels, including radioisotope thermoelectric generator “space batteries”.

​​For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

The DCS-5 and Dr. Sinter 515 are small-scale EFAS systems used for rapid experimentation and quick sample turnaround. These tools are key components of INL’s EFAS ecosystem, capable of producing parts ranging from 5 mm to 30 mm. They can apply up to 5 tons of pressure, reach peak temperatures of 2,500°C (4,532°F) and deliver up to 2,000 amps of peak current.

The DCS-5 is capable of in-situ X-ray scattering during sample processing, allowing for real-time identification of liquid phase formation and other microstructural changes during the sintering and bonding process.

For more information about this work, or potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

INL is developing a new experimental setup to study materials using X-ray CT scans, similar to medical CT scans. This setup will create 3D images to help researchers understand how materials change during a process called sintering. The data collected will help improve material design by providing insights into the tiny structures within materials and how they evolve.

For more information about this work, or potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

INL invented and built the first-of-its-kind continuous electric-field assisted sintering (CEFAS) prototype. Traditional EFAS instruments use a batch process where samples are compressed and heated in a die.

Instead of a batch process, CEFAS uses rollers to make a continuous part. Powders are sintered by passing an electric current through them as they are squeezed between the rollers. This continuous process significantly improves production speed and allows for the creation of longer parts. The CEFAS is ideal for making metallic or ceramic plates, layered composites and unique joining operations.

Sample throughput is an important factor for industry production and a batch process can be less than ideal compared to a continuous process.

For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

​

Modeling and Simulation

EFAS processes are made up of complex multi-physical fields. Modeling is a critical component of leveraging this advanced manufacturing technology to create materials for harsh environments. Material performance and access to near-net-shape part fabrication requires robust digital tools.

Near-net-shape part fabrication is a manufacturing technique in which the final product is close to the final (or net) shape, reducing or eliminating the need for machining or grinding.

Experimental Scale Multiphysics Modeling

Understanding the thermal gradients during EFAS is crucial for designing optimal parts. Spatial temperature gradients are a key and unique variable in the EFAS process. ​

​For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

The primary goal of the Advanced Methods for Manufacturing using Ontology and Numeric Objects for Iterative Design (AMMONOID) system is to create digital models of manufacturing processes. These digital models can be used to predict the performance of the products their physical twin will generate, speeding the development of manufacturing best practices.

AMMONOID defines a knowledge graph of engineering data and can export designs of experiment to manufacturing equipment.

For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

Machine learning and artificial intelligence allow modeling and prediction of properties and behaviors of materials by processing vast amounts of experimental and simulation data. Benefits include the ability to uncover complex, nonlinear relationships between things like material composition, processing conditions, and properties, from small samples of data. This leads to more accurate predictions and the discovery of new materials with limited input data.​

For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

Focus Areas

Advanced Material Development

EFAS can process a wide array of materials for harsh environments used across many technologies.

For more information about materials INL can process and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

Ceramics Composites Metallics
Borides
Cermets
Steel alloys

Nitrides
Multi-layer laminate
Titanium alloys
Carbides
Cermets
Refractory alloys
Metal Oxides
Metal matrix composites
High entropy alloys
Technical and functional ceramics
Fiber reinforced composites
Nickel superalloys
Solid oxide electrolyzers and fuel cells
Controlled porosity lattices
Oxide dispersion strengthened systems
Functionally graded materials
Functionally graded materials
Functionally graded materials

Areas of Impact

Materials Joining

EFAS can also be used to diffuse bond materials. Unlike traditional bonding methods, EFAS facilitates enhanced diffusion efficiency and bonds with good grain boundary migration across the materials interface to produce nearly flaw-free high-mechanical strength bonds without heat-affected zones or deleterious segregants. This is made possible by the movement of atoms that spread out, crossing interfaces and altering the grains’ sizes and orientations. This type of materials bonding finds applications in multilayer composites, bonding of dissimilar materials and manufacturing of heat exchangers.

For more information about material joining and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

Real-time structural health monitoring to assess safety and integrity is critical for components working in extreme environments.​

For example, fiber optics and magnetostrictive sensors can be embedded in high-temperature materials with advanced manufacturing for local and distributed sensing, enabling structural health monitoring for robust system operation and maintenance.

​For more information about embedded sensors and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

​

The high pressures and temperatures during EFAS processing can create failures in graphite tooling. INL is developing anisotropic composite materials with more strength and energy efficiency than traditional graphite tooling.

Anisotropy means that a material’s physical or mechanical properties change depending on the direction in which they are measured.

For more information about tool development and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

Parallel part processing technology is one way to improve EFAS sample throughput. Using custom tooling such as a honeycomb design, a single run produces multiple samples on a base plate. This technology allows different metals to be used in the same processing run. ​

For more information about parallel processing and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].

Advancing the Basic Science

Multiparticle Sintering Simulations​

The properties of materials manufactured by EFAS are strongly influenced by their microstructure. This microstructure results from complex interactions between the initial powder particles and the temperature, thermal gradients, electric field and mechanical stress applied in EFAS. Multi-particle simulations using the phase-field method, a mathematical model for solving interfacial problems, help understand the relationship between processing parameters and the microstructure and inform component-level simulations of the EFAS process.

For more information about multiparticle sintering, please contact [email protected].

After materials processing, a buildup of residual stress can cause parts to fracture during cooling, after the processing phase has been completed. Through residual stress mapping, INL evaluates whether a part will fracture and uses the information to improve processing conditions to significantly reduce residual stresses.

For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].​

Idaho National Laboratory