Design and Fabrication of New High Entropy Alloys for Evaluating Titanium Replacements in Additive Manufacturing

High entropy alloys (HEAs) were prepared using the powder bed fusion (PBF) technique. Among titanium free alloys AlCoCrFeNiMn, CoCr(1.3)FeMnNi(0.7), AlCoCrFeNi(1.3), and AlCoCr(1.3)FeNi(1.3) have been further investigated. A cost comparison was done for these four alloys as well as the titanium-based alloys AlCoCrFeNiTi and AlCo(0.8)CrFeNiTi. Such a comparison was done in order to evaluate the performance of the titanium-free alloys as the estimated cost of these will be less than for Ti-based HEAs. Hence, we have chosen four titanium free alloys and two titanium-based alloys for further processing. All these alloys were fabricated and subsequently characterized for phase, purity and performance. Scanning electron microscopy-based images were captured for microstructure characterization. EIS-based tests and potentiodynamic scans were performed to evaluate corrosion current. Hardness tests were performed for mechanical properties evaluation. Additional testing using factorial design tests was performed to evaluate the effects of various parameters to create better PBF-based HEA samples. EBSD tests, accelerated corrosion tests (mass loss), chemical analysis after degradation, microstructure analysis before and after degradation, and mechanical property comparison for finalized samples and other similar tests were executed. The details about all these HEAs and subsequent laser processing as well as behavior of these HEAs have been included in this study. It has been observed that some of the selected alloys exhibit good performance compared to Ti-based alloys, especially with respect to improvements in elastic constant and hardness relative to commercially pure Ti.