Creep Property and Phase Stability of Sulfur-Doped Ni-Base Single-Crystal Superalloys and Effectiveness of CaO Desulfurization

The direct and complete recycling method for Ni-base superalloy is being developed and studied to reduce the material cost for cost-effective operation of gas turbine systems. Understanding the effect of sulfur contamination is important to determine allowable sulfur content after the recycling. However, in the case of single-crystal superalloys, this effect on material properties is not well known except for the detrimental effect on the oxidation resistance. In the present study, creep tests, aging tests, and cyclic oxidation tests have been performed on PWA1484 with varying sulfur content. The increasing sulfur content has been found to correlate with degradation of properties evaluated here. It is observed that the decrease in creep life in PWA1484 due to sulfur doping is primarily due to coarsening of the gamma/gamma' interfacial dislocation network, increase in precipitation kinetics of topologically closed-packed phase, and decrease in oxidation resistance. For recycling purposes, a CaO crucible was used in the casting process, which successfully decreased the sulfur level in the alloy, and the resulting material showed comparable or even better properties in comparison to the low sulfur content material.