The aerospace industry is increasingly adopting metal additive manufacturing (AM) for both flight safety-critical aircraft parts and non-critical flight parts.

Much of the current research and development in additive manufacturing is devoted to making parts from just a few specific alloy compositions.

The Jominy end-quench test is used to measure the hardenability of a steel, which is a measure of the capacity of the steel to harden in depth under a given set of conditions. This article considers the basic concepts of hardenability and the Jominy test.

Heat treatment plays an important and – most would agree – critical role in gear manufacturing.

Gears perform the critical functions of transmitting power or carrying motion in mechanical assemblies.

The microstructure of a material represents its fundamental properties, and most heat treatments are performed to tailor these properties to a specific need. Good metallographic preparation allows faster and more-accurate quality control – whether a microstructural inspection or performing specific tests such as case-depth analysis.

Carnegie Mellon University Materials Science and Engineering Professor Liz Holm discusses using machine learning algorithms to search microstructure images for cracks, defects and rare features.

Today, BNA is a trusted nondestructive method for stress analysis, material characterization and the detection of heat-treatment and other thermally induced material defects.

Conducting tests on actual parts, while often both time-consuming and expensive, is extremely rewarding. Let’s learn more.