Grain Competitive Growth Prediction during Solidification in Single Crystal Superalloy DD6 Castings

Abstract

Competitive growth and grain selection were simulated and analyzed during the directional solidification with the conditions for single crystal superalloy DD6 castings using Commercial software, ProCAST. A three dimensional cellular automaton (CA) model coupled with finite-element (FE) heat flow calculation was applied. Measurements at the grain scale were made using the EBSD method at the cross sections in the starter block and grain selector at an interval of 4 mm from the chill surface. The grain characteristics and the rules of competition growth were obtained. The validity of the simulation results were compared with those of the experiment. It concluded that the model-predicted tendency shows satisfactory agreement with the experiment. Increasing the distance from the chill decreases the number of grains, increases the radius of grains and drives the crystallization orientation of grains to principal stress orientation.