High-performance metal alloys play a critical role in many defense applications, particularly for high-temperature and corrosive environments. Despite the superior yield strength, creep, and corrosion resistance, metal alloys usually have a low thermal conductivity as compared to most metals, which leads to significant challenges on the thermal management of alloy-based structures and systems. For instance, nickel-based superalloys (e.g., Inconel) have a thermal conductivity of 16 W/m-K at 1000 K, which is about 20X lower than that of copper. In this project, we will design a novel artificial intelligence (AI) driven additive manufacturing (AM) approach to manufacture functional nickel-copper composites with enhanced thermal and mechanical properties. From the AI-driven models, we expect to generate optimized parameters to guide both AM and material processing, which can significantly benefit the development of high-performance nickel-copper composites for DoD applications.
Project sponsor: Army Research Laboratory