EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

As materials for extreme environments, the Nickel-based superalloys and alpha-beta-Titanium-based alloys, as well as gamma-Ti-Al-based alloys find several applications, such as in turbines for aircraft engines. The employed casting processes for this materials are time consuming and costly, making it necessary to perform predictive simulations of the heat and material flow in the melt. Such simulations require precise material models, including data of thermophysical properties in the solid and liquid phase. Measurement of these thermophysical properties are challenging, due to the melts high solution reactivity. The method of choice is electromagnetic levitation, a containerless method. This method efficiently avoids reactions and contaminations of the liquid samples with the container material. However, gravitational forces have to be absent to obtain a spherical droplet with controlled fluid flow conditions.
In the recent years, we performed a number of measurements of thermophysical properties in the liquid phase on engineering materials using the Electromagnetic Levitator (ISS-EML) on board the European Space Laboratory Columbus in the international space station (ISS).
We give an overview over the ISS-EML capabilities and the thermophysical properties measured for a number of Ni-based superalloys and Ti-Al-based alloys.