AccScience Publishing / MSAM / Volume 3 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.36922/msam.2264
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Effects of carbon content on precipitate evolution and crack susceptibility in additively manufactured IN738LC

Zhongji Sun1* ,  Verner Soh1 ,  Coryl Lee1 ,  Delvin Wuu1 ,  Desmond Lau1 ,  Siyuan Wei1 ,  Chee Koon Ng1 ,  Swee Leong Sing2 ,  Dennis Tan1 ,  Pei Wang1,3*
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1 Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, Republic of Singapore
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Republic of Singapore
3 Engineering Cluster, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, Republic of Singapore
MSAM 2024, 3(1), 2264 https://doi.org/10.36922/msam.2264
Submitted: 16 November 2023 | Accepted: 8 January 2024 | Published: 19 February 2024
© 2024 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Hot cracking is a major bottleneck preventing the additive manufacturing community from adopting precipitation-strengthened nickel-base superalloys, such as the IN738LC. Prior literature demonstrates the beneficial outcome of increasing the carbon content within IN738LC to alleviate its hot cracking problem. However, the effect of carbon content on the gamma prime precipitation and grain recrystallization was not fully addressed. Here, we fabricated five sample sets of IN738LC with different carbon contents and subjected these samples to two separate heat treatment processes. The precipitate and grain evolution were monitored under the backscattered electron imaging and electron backscattered diffraction studies. While the carbon addition could assist in addressing the hot cracking problem, horizontal delamination cracks were detected during the fabrication of large samples when the overall carbon content was above 0.4 wt.%, highlighting the need for care when introducing carbon for the purpose of resolving hot cracking.

Keywords
Additive manufacturing
Cracking
Nickel-base superalloy
Carbon
Funding
Z. Sun acknowledges financial support from the Career Development Fund (grant reference no.: C222812017), Young Individual Research Grant (Grant reference no.: M22K3c0096); and P. Wang acknowledges the financial support from the Individual Research Grant (grant reference no.: A20E7c0109) from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore.
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Conflict of interest
No potential competing interests.
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Materials Science in Additive Manufacturing, Electronic ISSN: 2810-9635 Published by AccScience Publishing
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