CONTROLLING REMELTING PROCESSES FOR SUPERALLOYS AND AEROSPACE TI ALLOYS

Remelting is performed to facilitate the production of clean, fully de nse, homogeneous castings of superalloys and aerospace titanium alloys and is crucial to the defect-free production of these important mater ials. Modern electroslag remelting and vacuum are remelting control sy stems are closed-loop, single input-single output systems that oversim plify the physical properties of the processes; the ever-increasing de mand for cleaner, more highly engineered, chemically tuned alloys has pushed these control methodologies to their limit. A new generation of these controllers is being developed by the Specialty Metals Process Consortium and Sandia National Laboratories to answer the challenges o f remelting control for the next generation of alloys; these control s ystems will use multiple sensor inputs and apply material-specific sys tem and process models.