SBIR Phase II: Multi-Principal Element Alloy Fillers for Cost-Effectiveness and Toughness Enhancement in Brazing of Turbine Engine Components

About This Grant

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to promote America’s manufacturing independence by offering a breakthrough opportunity in the braze filler material classes that facilitate economic assembly and repair of components functioning in demanding operating environments, while greatly enhancing their mechanical performance and reliability. Precious metals-based fillers have dominated a wide swath of filler applications since the 1950s due to their favorable melting temperature range and low reactivity with other engineering materials. These applications include fuel system assembly for gas turbine engines in the power generation and aerospace industries, an early focal application in this project, where gas turbine OEMs and fuel-system subcontractors represent early prospective customers. This work targets precious metal consumption displacement by multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), which contain far more abundant component elements and can be tailored to meet the demands of specific applications. A successful commercialization effort will carry far-reaching impacts for America’s economic competitiveness and independence from foreign-sourced critical and noble metals in the brazing filler market (with a global market size of $5.5B in 2030) and beyond. The benefits of MPEAs can be exploited for structural applications with demanding operating conditions. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will realize these impacts by supporting in-operando component-level testing for use cases identified through close collaboration with industry for early adoption. A key outcome of Phase I was utilizing a high-throughput computational methodology to rapidly design tailored MPEA compositions, overcoming a decades-long lag in innovation in the braze filler material research space. Phase II aims to translate this innovation into a user-ready product by (1) finely tailoring final alloy compositions for customer-specified performance attributes, and (2) enabling the fabrication of alloys in powder format, which is suitable for drop-in replacement of current alternatives in most applications. The characteristically high flexibility in composition design for MPEAs, coupled with our established design platform, is anticipated to enable rapid identification of the optimized fine-tuned compositions. Once fully specified, these will be manufactured at the bench scale to support low-volume component-level testing with the earliest adopters in parallel with bringing our pilot-scale manufacturing capabilities online for progressively higher-volume tests. It is targeted to have the product be classified in a specification by a certifying agency and approved for at least one use case at one or more major OEMs by the conclusion of Phase II. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.