Thermodynamic Modelling and Experimental Investigation of Tungsten Partitioning in Nickel Based Alloys

Abstract: Thermo-Calc software AB develops high quality thermodynamic and kinetic databases to predict and simulate accurately multi-component phase behaviour in complex systems. One problem with their Ni-based alloys and superalloy solutions database (TCNI8) is poor description of tungsten partitioning for multi-component nickel based alloys. This work investigates the thermodynamic description of some lower-order systems i.e., Ni-W, Al-Ni-W and Cr-Ni-W by performing key experiments on three binary Ni-W alloys, and two ternary alloys (Al-Ni-W and Cr-Ni-W). Experiments at four different temperatures were carried out in which alloys were homogenized, equilibrated, quenched and investigated to determine the equilibrium solid/liquid compositions. Experimental results are used to validate the thermodynamic descriptions of the liquid and the fcc phase. Unlike ternary Al-Ni-W and Cr-Ni-W, binary Ni-W reproduced the experimental information in a satisfactory way. Ternary parameters for fcc are changed to fit the experimental results of this work. The findings of this work highlight that ternary parameters for the fcc of Al-Ni-W and Cr-Ni-W systems significantly effect the tungsten partitioning values in higher order systems.