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.
- Electrical power-generating industries:
- Nuclear
- Renewables (solar, wind, geothermal)
- Combustion (hydrogen, natural gas, biomass and coal)
- Energy-intensive technologies:
- Turbines (gas, steam and wind)
- Furnaces
- Heat recovery systems
- Nuclear reactors
- Drilling equipment (oil and gas)
- Chemical/refining processes (metal, ceramic and composites)
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, processing time and carbon emissions.
Capabilities
Experimental
From the production of parts on an industrially relevant scale to probing single particles during EFAS, INL has the resources and expertise to advance the science of electric-field assisted sintering, develop new advanced materials, and de-risk industry adoption of this advanced manufacturing process.
EFAS can process materials from room temperature up to 2,300 degrees Celsius (4172 F) while simultaneously applying 5 to 800 tons of load.
DCS-800
INL is home to the world’s largest format of EFAS system that is experimentally available with ram diameters of nearly 0.5m.
The DCS-800 uses Joule heating to directly heat the sample/mold ensemble 70% faster than hot pressing. It leverages current 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 perform unique joining operations.
For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
Continuous Electric Field Assisted Sintering (CEFAS)
INL invented and built first-of-its-kind continuous electric-field assisted sintering (CEFAS) prototype. EFAS instruments use a batch process where samples are compressed and heated in a die.
CEFAS passes electric current through conductive rollers, sintering powders as they’re squeezed between the rollers. By converting to a continuous process, the CEFAS represents a significant throughput improvement and produces high aspect ratio parts with unlimited length. It is ideal for sintering 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 with a continuous process.
For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
Radiological EFAS (DCS 25-10)
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].
Lab Scale EFAS (DCS-5 & Dr. Sinter 515)
The DCS-5 and Dr. Sinter 515 are small scale EFAS systems used for rapid experimentation and quick sample turnaround. They’re the work horses of INL’s EFAS ecosystem, producing parts as small as 5mm and up to 30mm.
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 and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
Nanoscale EFAS
To support data informed material and process design, INL is developing a beamline compatible setup to study the fundamental mechanisms present during EFAS.
The Nanoscale SPS is an experimental methodology designed to be integrated into x-ray or neutron beam lines to investigate processes that occur during sintering. It makes it possible to capture three-dimensional images and data on the changes in pore structure of a sintered material. This data will feed and validate engineering and particle level material models.
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].
Digital Twin Modeling
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
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 |
Ceramic matrix composites |
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 technique is also used to diffusion bond materials. Unlike traditional bonding methods, EFAS uniquely passes current into materials, allowing enhanced diffusion efficiency and bonds with good grain boundary migration and high-mechanical strength. This material bonding has applications in multilayer composites, bonding dissimilar materials, and manufacturing heat exchangers.
For more information about material joining and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
Embedded Sensors
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].
Tool Development
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.
For more information about tool development and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
Parallel Processing
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, electric field and mechanical stress applied in EFAS. Multi-particle simulations using the phase-field method help understand the relationship between processing parameters and the microstructure to inform component-level simulations of the EFAS process.
For more information about multiparticle sintering, please contact [email protected].
Residual Stress Mapping
After processing, a buildup of residual stress can cause parts to fracture during cooling. Through residual stress mapping, INL evaluates whether a part will fracture and improves processing conditions to reduce residual stresses.
For more information about this work and potential partnership opportunities, please contact [email protected].
