Ultrafine Grained Ti-47Al-2Cr (at%) Alloy Prepared by High Energy Mechanical Milling and Hot Isostatic Pressing

Gamma TiAl based alloys are important materials with potential applications in aerospace and automotive applications due to their high specific strength and creep resistance. The major barrier for their applications is their limited ductility at room temperature and limited hot workability. One way of overcoming this barrier is to reduce the grain sizes to ultrafine grained (<500μm) or nanostructured (<100nm) level. In our present study, we attempt to produce bulk ultrafine grained Ti- 47Al-2Cr (at%) alloy using a combination of high energy mechanical milling of elemental powders to produce a very fine structured Ti/Al/Cr composite powder and consolidation of the powder using hot isostatic pressing (HIPping). It was confirmed that high energy ball milling using a planetary ball mill led to the formation of extremely fine Ti and Al layered composite structure. The thermal behaviour of the powder was studied using differential thermal analysis, and it was shown that the reactions between the Ti and Al phases in the fine structured composite powder occur at fairly low temperatures, below the melting point of the Al phase (660oC). The macrostructure and phase structure of the HIPped samples were also examined using optical and scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffractometry (XRD). This paper is to report and discuss the results of this investigation.