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Procedia CIRP 22 (2014) 263 – 267

3rd International Conference on Through-life Engineering Services

Session: Recent Progress in Jet-Engine Regeneration

Crack repair of single crystal turbine blades using laser cladding technology
Boris Rottwinkel*, Christian Nölke, Stefan Kaierle, Volker Wesling
Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V., Hollerithallee 8, 30419 Hanover, Germany

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 511 27 88 234; fax: +49 511 27 88 100. E-mail address: b.rottwinkel@lzh.de

Abstract

The formation of cracks in single crystal (SX) turbine blades is a common problem for aero-engines. To repair cracks, which are located
under the tip-area, a new method is to clad with single-crystal-technology. This technology use multi-layer cladding to replace the single crystal
material. To regenerate cracked material it is necessary to remove the crack affected material. The used notch geometries to remove the crack-
affected area must be weldable and also permit the material solidification in the same oriented plane as the original microstructure. To solidify
in the original structure a thermal gradient has to be introduced in order to guide the grain growth. This required gradient can be established by
inductive heating. To reduce the thermal effected zone, a laser source is used. In addition, it is also an efficient process to fill the notch. Also
the small local heat input and controlled material supply support the epitaxial growth. However, there are requirements to achieve a SX
structure without cracks and pores. Current achievements and further challenges are presented in this paper.

©©2014
2014Elsevier
The Authors. Published
B.V. This by Elsevier
is an open B.V. under the CC BY-NC-ND license
access article
Peer-review under responsibility of the Programme Chair of EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Services. under responsibility of the Programme Chair of the 3rd InternationalThrough-life Engineering Conference
Peer-review

Keywords: turbine blade repair; laser cladding; single crystalline

1. Main text single crystal structures withstand creep at higher temperature

levels then common structures. Grain boundaries within the
The volume of the blade repair market all over the world is microstructure can initiate failure mechanisms, which
immense. Aircraft engines servicing accounts about 30 decrease the high temperature strength that causes creep
percent of the total cost of the whole aircraft maintenance. failure.
Maintenance of the single crystal turbine blades, which are At their shop visit poly crystalline laser cladding is used to
used in Stage 1 or in today´s state of the art engines also in deposit a new tip area to the HPT-blades. The area is
Stage 2 and 3 of the high-pressure-turbine (HPT), is still a afterwards refinished to the original shape of the tip [1]
complex process. (Fig. 1).
Due to the high thermal and mechanical stresses during
operation, these parts are mainly manufactured in a complex
casting procedure to achieve a single crystal microstructure.
The specific morphology is oriented along the direction of
axial stresses. This orientation increases the operating limits
significantly compared to polycrystalline blades also used in
aero-engines. Fig. 1: Poly crystalline repair
The most common failure case in turbine blades is creep.
That is also the life limiting factor. Due to significant The regeneration of single crystal morphology offers
reduction of grain boundaries for epitaxial orientation, the beneficial mechanical properties at the repaired zones and

2212-8271 © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the Programme Chair of the 3rd InternationalThrough-life Engineering Conference
doi:10.1016/j.procir.2014.06.151
264 Boris Rottwinkel et al. / Procedia CIRP 22 (2014) 263 – 267

enables extended limits for parts repair. In consequence, a 680 W, a wavelength of 940/980 nm and a fibre diameter of
higher quality level can be reached and the long term 400 μm was used. The used process parameters are
perspective offers an increased number of refurbished scrap summarized in Table 1.
parts.
As an additive manufacturing tool, the laser cladding a.
process is a well-established method to repair turbine blades.
Its advantage lies on the possibility of localized heat input,
which enables a reduced heat affected zone in the repair zone,
which supports the formation of a single crystalline structure.
The laser cladding process can be realized using powder or
wire as additive material.
To avoid nucleation in the laser cladding process, Kurz et
al. [2] postulate the columnar to equiaxed transition (CET)
(Fig. 2). This transition correlates the effect of the thermal b.
gradient to the solidification speed.

Fig, 3: SX-cladding without (a) and with (b) preheating

Table 1: single crystal clad parameter

Without preheating With preheating
(Fig. 1a) (Fig. 1b)
Feed rate [mm/min] 100 100
Powder feed rate [g/min] 3 3
Laser power [W] 100 – 350 100 – 350
Temperature at molten bath [°C] 1400 1400
Fig, 2: CET - columnar to equiaxed transition [2]
Preheat temperature [°C] - 650
The required thermal gradient to reach columnar
solidification was calculated by Gaeumann et al. [3]. This To repair turbine blades with cracks, as shown in Fig. 4 the
identified limits enabled the growth of equiaxed grains within cladding process cannot be performed with a single track.
the molten material. To rebuild large areas like tips on blades, the process must
In the present work, the laser cladding process was be extended to multi-track cladding per layer without crack
considered for the similar SX-repair of single-crystalline formation. The formation of cracks during notch cladding was
blades made of CMSX-4. Santos et al. [4] were able to clad
an important fact to be analyzed. It was explicit that the notch
single crystal structures on flat samples by using two different
geometry turns the SX clad into a complex system due to heat
alloys. The use of Rene N4 powder on CMSX-4 substrate
distribution and residual stresses in the region.
showed a single crystal microstructure orientation. Gaeumann
et. al. [5] were able to clad crack free single track-volumes on abrasive wear cracks
a mono crystalline CMSX-4 substrate to rebuild single crystal
structures. To clad single tracks, like small walls, Gaeumann
claim three main steps for the single crystal formation:

x The temperature of the used substrate should be as

low as possible.
x Preheating should be avoided.
x Avoid overheating of the melt pool by using a Fig. 4: Damage on turbine blade tip
laser power control
The introduction of a notch in the substrate is a method
Those three recommendations could be proven during our developed to optimize the crack repair on the tip of turbine
investigations (Fig. 3a). In Fig. 3b, the substrate was blades. It consists of cutting the damaged region with a known
preheated to show the effect on the crystal formation using a geometry in order to remove the crack and rebuilt it. On the
preheated substrate. other hand, the clad complexity is increased due to the energy
During the process, a water cooled platform was used to distribution inside the notch. The heat flow occurs no longer
reduce the temperature of the substrate to 18°C. The distance in one dimension, but in two, since the heat propagates to the
between heating and cooling front should support the required lateral area as well. This phenomenon generates a region
thermal gradient, which was calculated before. For the laser suitable for crack formation due to residual stresses resulting
cladding process, a diode laser with maximum power of from tensile and compressive strength. In order to reduce
 Boris Rottwinkel et al. / Procedia CIRP 22 (2014) 263 – 267 265

stresses, a thermal induction is used to preheat the substrate realized by an argon flow (8 l/min) through the conveyor. The
by means of an electromagnetic field. This decreases the powder feed rate was about 3 g/min. Prior to the
temperature gradient on the one hand, but reduces the residual investigations the process chamber was flooded with argon to
stresses. reduce the concentration of oxygen to a value below
Since the SX alloys do not contain grain boundary 2.000 ppm. Additionally, the argon flow for the powder
hardening elements, it is necessary that the reshaping transport also shield the process zone from oxidation. This
technique also results in a single crystal for the required enables an oxygen level below 500 ppm. An inductive heating
material properties to avoid cracking. To avoid the formation with a power of 3 kW and a dynamic controlled frequency of
of grains, the thermal gradient must be formed well. During 70 – 450 kHz was used to support the thermal gradient
laser cladding, the thermal gradient is orientated to the cold required for epitaxial solidification. For cooling the sample a
substrate and at the clad´s top rectangular to the clad water cooled mounting was used as heat sink. The cooling
direction. Using multi-track cladding, these orientations will medium was tempered to 18 °C. As control unit the
be extended to multi direction. These directions are influenced temperature control system TemCon was used to stabilize the
by the clad tracks next to each other. To avoid more thermal adjusted induction temperature.
gradient orientations, long processing times or even high The required distance between cooling and heating and the
energy levels should be avoided. subsequent gradient was focused in the first part of the
On the other hand, for the repair of cracked blades, the research. To reduce development time and costs at the 6-axis
thermal expansion of nickel-base superalloys results in high CNC-station, the gradient and the thermal distribution were
tensile stresses in the cladded notch. To avoid this, preheating numerically simulated with AnsysTM. These simulations result
of the samples shows advantages, even if this was negated by in the mandatory parameters for the required preheating
Gaeumann. To overcome this problem, a specific temperature temperature, distance between crack and cooling mount and
distribution is required to enable a heated and a cooled front the location of the induction coil. For verification of the
that controls the direction of solidification. correct solidification direction a metallographic analysis was
performed at selected samples after cladding. These results
2. Laser cladding technology were finally proven using electron back scattering diffraction
(EBSD), which is a technique commonly used to examine the
Initially the laser cladding trials were performed on small crystallographic orientation of materials and to detect the
flat CMSX-4 substrates (dimensions: 30 x 30 x 2 mm³) to preferred orientation of the crystalline material.
simplify the process setup and to reduce the number of
significant parameters. The substrates were casted with single 3. Results
crystal orientation and cut in a subsequent step using EDM
(Electrical Discharge Machining). CMSX-4 was used as Epitaxial solidification for claddings made of CMSX-4 on
substrate and also as addition powder material to process with flat CMSX-4 substrates could be realized using a laser based
similar materials. The focus diameter of the laser beam was process. A metallographic cross section is pictured in Fig. 6,
adjusted to 0.860 mm. To achieve a single-step process due to the specific preparation the directional solidification is
without predeposition of additive material before laser clearly visible. The cladded sample has a dimension of
treatment, a powder feeder and a coaxial powder nozzle were h 1.2 x w 1.1 x d 5 mm³ and was built by the overlap of five
used to transport the additive powder material into the single clads on top of each other, without applying any
processing zone. The used powder is spherical shaped and has additional preheating. This solidification behavior could be
a grain size distribution of 25 - 75 μm. The powder particles observed at short term processes and comparably small
did not show any gas inlets, which reduce the quality of the cladded areas only. The general processing times did not
clad and lead to pores. The experimental setup consisting of exceed 5 s.
the nozzle and the optical components is shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 6: Cross section of laser cladded CMSX-4 sample (single-track per layer)

To avoid cracking in larger volume, which need several

clad tracks per layer, preheating was used. By using a
controlled cooling rate, the formation of solidification cracks
Fig, 5: Optical components and coaxial powder nozzle can be suppressed. The ratio between preheating temperature
and laser power is crucial and has a significant impact
To have an inert transport atmosphere, the feeding was towards the single crystal formation. To test the cladding into
266 Boris Rottwinkel et al. / Procedia CIRP 22 (2014) 263 – 267

larger samples, the clad was built with four tracks next to each the clad cladding process. The gradient could be established
other, which were overlapped by six layers. The final by the induction heating and the water cooling.
dimensions of these samples were: h 1.5 x w 2.1 x d 30 mm³. Table 2: Parameter for notch cladding
A total epitaxial solidification is achieved with the removal of Sample Focus diameter Feed rate Temp. Preheating
the last layer (Fig. 7). The required preheating temperature of [mm] [mm/min] [°C] [W/°C]
N1 0.860 100 1400 -
850 °C for tip cladding was determined theoretically in N2 0.860 100 1400 2000/650
advance and could be transferred directly to the process.
The result of sample 1 (N1) is shown in Fig. 10.
a. b.

Fig. 7: Microscopic picture of the cross section of laser cladded CMSX-4

with large volume (multi-track layer)

To verify the epitaxial structure, the EDAX EBSD system,

type OIM XM4 was used (Fig. 8) to detect crystallographic Fig. 10: Sample N1
orientation of the cladded area. The Kikuchi patterns have
been visualized in an orientation mapping using varying The microstructure of N1 approximates to the single
colors for each crystal orientation. crystal solidification even in the cross section, but there are
cracks and pores in it. The thermal expansion of the material
result in the formation of stresses which initiated cracks. Their
origin was at the top of the clad. Guided along the few grain
boundaries, cracks stopped at the original SX-structure.
Sample N2 showed a crack free clad with equiaxed
solidification. Since the preheating is the only difference
between, it is reasonable to assume that the microstructure is
Fig. 8: EBSD analysis of CMSX-4 clad vulnerable to the thermal induction influence.
These two experiments showed that preheating has a
In the EBSD analysis the directional solidification of the significant influence on the grain growth during solidification
CMSX-4 powder on the similar substrate is shown. Generally, inside the notch. It is important to consider that the thermal
the clad shows a completely homogenous crystal orientation. induction, despite providing a crack free microstructure, is
At the top end, sporadic disorientations of the clad are visible. unsuitable for the formation of a single crystal clad. However,
These disorientation areas have appeared during the bulge trials without preheating have shown cracks, which are also
formation during the cladding. Within the bulky area the heat unacceptable.
propagation is changing and consequently there are deviations To reduce crack formation, parameters were changed to
regarding the appropriate value and orientation of the thermal pursuit the formation of thinner layers in order to reduce the
gradient. To overcome such defects the input of the inductive required laser power and so the loss of the thermal gradient
heating and also the local cooling must be adjusted to orientation. The preheating of the sample was skipped to
reestablish the former gradient for SX gladding in these areas. reduce the temperature in the clad area. These small single
In order to clad cracks on blades, feasible notch geometries crystal layers may be more resist against the residual stresses
have to be determined. In Fig. 9, the used notch geometry is indicated by thermal expansion. In the next steps the powder
shown. Tests have been used to evaluate the interaction injection was reduced to 1 g/min and 2 g/min. This results in a
grades between notch geometry, induction system and powder lower laser power through reduced powder interactions and
supply. melting energy. Also, to limit the laser power to minimum,
the laser was controlled using a PID-controller with a
pyrometer to control the temperature of the clad pool to
1400°C. The melting temperature of the used alloy is about
1380°C. But cracks could still be detected.
To reduce the laser interaction time with the substrate, the
feed rate in the next samples was increased by 50 percent.
Using the increased speed, the heat affected zone was
decreased. Nevertheless, cracks occurred and the
microstructure showed polycrystalline phases. To form the
Fig. 9: Notch geometry thermal gradient more precise the focus diameter was expand
Table 2 shows the used parameter for the initial test. These form 0.860 mm to 1.342 mm. Consequential the number of
parameters were the result of the previous experiment for the layers required to fill the notch was reduced. With the
single crystal tip cladding. Preheating was set to 650°C to reduction of layers per area, the laser time was reduced. Also
form the required thermal gradient inside the notch. The the cooling time between the single cladding steps was risen
required preheat temperature was calculated before to fit for to cool down the cladding more homogeneous. In the
 Boris Rottwinkel et al. / Procedia CIRP 22 (2014) 263 – 267 267

metallographic analysis of the samples, cracks could be with the shown parameters is not possible yet. The interaction
detected. between the inductive preheating and the dendrite growth has
Another way to reduce the start of cracks was to reduce the to be analyzed in the next step.
preheating temperature. The initial temperature was calculated
to fit the required gradient. Thus the gradient was reduced. Acknowledgements
The preheating was controlled by a PID-Controller to set the
required temperature. By reducing the required temperature, The work was funded by the German Research Foundation
the influence from the thermal induction was reduced and the (DFG) in the framework of the work in the Collaborative
analysis shows the initial formation of a single crystal Research Centre 871 (CRC871).
microstructure in the bottom region. In order to reduce even
more the action of the thermal induction, the inductive
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The crack repair with notching the cracked tip and cladding