Age-Hardening Process Featuring Anomalous Aging Time

摘要

This document describes a process/strategy for age hardening nickel based alloys to create desirable properties with reduced energy expenditure. The inventive process introduces isolated atom nucleation sites to accelerate the nucleation rate by approximately 36 times, thereby permitting age hardening to occur in significantly less time and with significantly less energy expenditure.

主权项

1. A method for achieving accelerated age hardening in a metal alloy while minimizing the risk of over-aging, comprising:
a. providing a metal alloy containing nickel, molybdenum, chromium, and rhenium; b. wherein said rhenium comprises 3% to 10% of the total weight of said metal alloy; c. wherein nickel comprises the majority of said metal alloy by weight; and d. subjecting said metal alloy to an age hardening process that forms long-range-ordered precipitates of the form Ni2Re.