Wed, 27 January, 2021
The development of Compositionally Complex Materials requires Complex workflows, as the one that Energy Intensive Industries adopts to maximise their efficiency.
The workflow that FORGE has defined, will bring the partners in a journey from theoretical material modelling to real industrial application. FORGE covers all the steps in between, and planned iterative cross-validations of its results to select down the most reliably performing coatings.
The field of Compositionally Complex Material (CCM) is vast, and Thermodynamic Calculations are not sufficient to provide enough information to identify suitable element composition. In FORGE Machine Learning models will be used to support the initial composition selection and the following material synthesis and coating manufacturing.
The synthesis methods will be multiple: Induction Melting, PVD and Mechanical Alloying, providing insights on different aspects of the CCM composition and possibly generating results beyond the targets of FORGE, that is focused on material for the production of Coatings.
Metallic coatings and ceramic coatings can be produced with several techniques, FORGE selected five coating manufacturing processes that will be tested against all the material to identify the most effective ones, on respect to the CCM composition and targeted properties. Thermal Spray techniques, such as High Velocity Oxygen Fuelled thermal pray (HVOF), High Velocity Air Fuelled thermal spray (HVAF), and Cold Gas Spray (CGS) will be used along with Laser Cladding and Spray Coating.
The coatings will be assessed for their intrinsic properties, to identify the processing conditions that are more effective, and for their specific behaviour against the four performance targets identified in the project.
This approach is expected to generate a huge amount of data that will be collected and processed by the Machine Learning algorithm to support the development of the manufacturing process.
Each industry represented in FORGE - Steel, Aluminium, Ceramic and Cement- has defined a different use case scenario, and the last part of the project will be dedicated to the testing on-site of the industrial components improved in FORGE with the addition of a CCM Coatings.
FORGE is looking ahead, and in parallel to the development of the CCM coatings it is also developing smart solutions of the early detection of the degradation of the coating in service, to provide to the final user a reliable tool for maintenance planning.
All the data collected in the project, from early material development stages, to synthesis, coating manufacturing, its use and the related life cycle footprint, are going to be collected in a Knowledge Base Platform. The algorithms developed during the project will give the possibility to external users, new customers and early adopters, to identify new CCM and their Coating Manufacturing Process that suits to their use case scenarios.
Article Courtesy: Alvise Bianchin, MBN nanomaterialia s.p.a.
Schematic overview of steel making (source: www.arcelormittal.com)