Influence of Trapped Gas on Pore Healing under Hot Isostatic Pressing in Nickel-Base Superalloys

Under the typical hot isostatic pressing (HIP) processing conditions, plastic deformation by dislocation slip is considered the primary mechanism for pore shrinkage, according to experimental observations and deformation mechanism maps. In the present work, a crystal plasticity model has been used to investigate the influence of applied pressure and holding time on porosity reduction in a nickel-base single crystal superalloy. The influence of trapped gas on pore shrinkage is modeled by coupling mechanical deformation with pore–gas interaction. In qualitative agreement with experimental investigations, we observe that increasing the applied pressure or the holding time can effectively reduce porosity. Furthermore, the effect of pore shape on the shrinkage is observed to depend on a combination of elastic anisotropy and the complex distribution of stresses around the pore. Simulation results also reveal that, for pores of the same shape, smaller pores (radius < 0.1 μm) have a higher shrinkage rate in comparison to larger pores (radius ≥ 0.1 μm), which is attributed to the increasing pore surface energies with decreasing pore sizes. It is also found that, for smaller initial gas-filled pores (radius < 0.1 μm), HIP can result in very high gas pressures (on the order of GPa). Such high pressures either act as a driving force for argon to diffuse into the surrounding metal during HIP itself, or it can result in pore re-opening during subsequent annealing or mechanical loading. These results demonstrate that the micromechanical model can quantitatively evaluate the individual influences of HIP processing conditions and pore characteristics on pore annihilation, which can help optimize the HIP process parameters in the future.