Research Projects
Titanium and Magnesium
A Digital Twin of abnormally coarse grain structures in critical titanium forgings for military aircraft applications
Titanium Ti-6Al-4V alloys are ubiquitous in structural aerospace components due to a high specific strength and fatigue resistance. The desired microstructure can be achieved via thermomechanical processing including a β annealing stage. During this stage however, unusually large abnormally coarse grain (ACG) structures have been found to develop in the microstructure, potentially compromise the mechanical performance of the materials. There is currently an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms behind this observation, however earlier work, including that of N.Byres have linked the formation of these ACG structures to the starting textures, noting that a rolling cube structure could set up the conditions leading to the growth of ACGs. The project aims to exploit In-situ characterisation experiments (such as EBSD and SEM) to produce real time data for the model on growth kinetics and grain boundary mobilities. This could then be used to extrapolate and predict regimes of instabilities in the grain growth behaviour.