Chromium use in Gas Turbine Engines help

[Shogun]

Hi all,

I'm hoping that someone may be able to help! I'm doing a project which has involved me looking at the use of superalloys in Gas Turbine engines (i.e. Rolls Royce, GE etc).

As part of that I am looking in particular at the use of Chromium within these engines, does anybody have any information (or links etc) to information on Chromium, in particular things like market commentry on supply and demand, prices, and what would be really helpful is a list of all the alloys within an engine which contain chromium and info on how they are produced, who produces them etc.

I have found a few bits and bobs and an old book from 1995 but am struggling to find anything else.

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks

 

[Astronuc]

A lot of information is proprietary to the manufacturers like GE, Rolls, Pratt & Whitney, . . . .

Sometimes papers show up at materials conferences, particular the TMS Superalloys conference. Earlier jet engineers used a variety of Inconels, e.g. 718, and Rene

The superalloys are pimarily Ni and Co based alloys for high temperature service in the hot sections - combustor and turbine. Cr is certainly an alloying element.

See this thread - https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=242166
Note the composition of CMSX4, and compare it to the composition of Inc718.

See - Development and turbine engine performance of three advanced rhenium containing superalloys for single crystal and directionally solidified blades and vanes
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2325036


This paper should be of interest - http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~cecamp/spring08/Reed08.pdf
It indicates that Cr content has been declining for a while, whereas the content of refractories like W, Ta and Re has been increasing.

This is a nice introductory reference -
http://www.tms.org/Meetings/Specialty/Superalloys2000/SuperalloysHistory.html

Another interesting overivew of advanced materials, but it's short on the details of alloys.
www.cmse.ed.ac.uk/AdvMat45/SuperEng.pdf[/URL]

And this, which mentions 3 superalloys used by RR.
[PLAIN]http://members.nickelinstitute.org/index.cfm/ci_id/13098.htm

This gives compositions of some superalloys
http://www.azom.com/Details.asp?ArticleID=152

This has some compositions of turbine disc alloys
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/45815/01/Everitt_et_al_Mater_Sci_Techn_23_2007_1419.pdf

It would be difficult to obtain a good estimate for the quantity of Cr being used, because one has to determine the alloys in the spindle, turbine disc, blades, and combustor and exhaust nozzle components, and the masses thereof, and that means knowing a lot of detail of the engine designs.

 

[FredGarvin]

Astro nuc is right in that a lot of the information you want to get is proprietary. At least from my company it would be. Have you tried actually contacting the public relations departments of each company? This is not exactly textbook material. You have to go to the source.

One other place you should look is on the specialty metals manufacturer's web sites. They do have a lot of technical information. Take a look at places like Carpenter, Inconel and others.