Niobium is commonly added to steels across a wide range of industries to enhance an alloy's wear resistance and overall strength.
QuesTek will explore material compositions leveraging Niobium to achieve high strength and heat resistance in novel alloys suitable for additive manufacturing. Using its ICMD materials design and engineering platform, QuesTek can explore the addition of Niobium to a wide array of alloys as well as how current Niobium alloys can be optimised.
Jason Sebastian Executive Vice President of Market Operations said: "In the world of high-temperature metal alloys, right now Niobium is one of the most-promising candidates. When it comes to turbines, rocket engines and hypersonic materials, the hotter they can run the more fuel-efficient they become. This partnership between CBMM and QuesTek is positioned to enable new levels of performance through niobium-containing novel materials."
Partnership with CBMM is a natural next step for QuesTek to designing Niobium alloys under the ARPA-E "ULTIMATE" programme. In this programme QuesTek is applying computational materials design to additive manufacturing (AM), coating technology, and turbine design/manufacturing to develop a comprehensive solution for a next-generation turbine blade alloy and coating system capable of sustained operation at 1300°C. As a part of this program, QuesTek has developed and matured several physics-based material property models, and has develop kinetic and thermodynamic databases for niobium alloy systems exclusive to QuesTek.
QuesTek's digital capabilities using ICMD dramatically reduces the amount of physical experimentation needed to design, develop and deploy novel materials. While the partnership with CBMM is focused exclusively on Niobium alloys, ICMD is capable of optimizing countless other materials and applications.
"Nickel-based superalloys could be reaching their full potential of optimisation," says Rafael Mesquita, CBMM's Technology Director. "QuesTek is at the forefront of the digital transformation of materials engineering and this partnership creates the opportunity to achieve more of the vast potential of Niobium for heat resistance and other properties. ICMD and QuesTek's expertise in physics-based modelling are perfectly suited to unlock enormous unrealised value in Niobium through new applications worldwide."
