Editorial on “Alloys and Processes for Aerospace and Nuclear Sectors Special Section”

Abstract

The aerospace and nuclear sectors demand materials that can withstand extreme environments, high temperatures, and radiation exposure while ensuring long-term reliability and safety. For such demanding applications, the choice and improvement of metallic alloys become highly critical. Equally challenging is the manufacturing of these materials to meet the above requirements. This was the main vision when we conceived the idea of this special section “Alloys and processes for aerospace and nuclear sectors”. This special section covers a wide variety of materials, both conventional and future-alternatives, that show great resistance to deformation under extreme temperatures and radiation conditions.

There is a continuous drive towards designing and developing new materials to withstand the extreme and harsh conditions. This special issue presents a collection in a wide variety of materials that serve either the aerospace, or the nuclear sectors, or both. A particular focus of the collection has been to study the structural response vis-a-vis the stability of these materials either under operating conditions or during specific manufacturing routes. Towards this, some of the materials that have been reported herein, but not limited to, include Ni-superalloys (adem.202401954; adem.202401905; adem.202401479; adem.202400524; adem.202401594), advanced steels (adem.202400767; adem.202401442), Ti-alloys (adem.202401494), and refractory metal-based alloys (adem.202401818; adem.202402330).

To fabricate these safety-critical alloys, it is equally important to select the appropriate processing routes. While cast-and-wrought processing is still prevalent and employed for many of engineering alloys but keeping in mind the environmental regulations, use of low-cost, low-energy, low-waste route of additive manufacturing through 3D-printing has also been gaining acceptance especially for high value component manufacturing in aerospace and defence industries. Besides bulk fabrication of components, many applications require dissimilar materials to be joined or coated thereby making such interfaces highly sensitive to selection of welding or coating processes. This special section, therefore, presents, a variety of processes through which such extreme engineering alloys/components can be fabricated. Some of the processes include additive manufacturing through Laser Powder Bed Fusion (adem.202400524; adem.202401442; adem.202401905; adem.202401954), dissimilar metal joining (adem.202401594; adem.202400767; adem.202401479; adem.202401479), as well as conventional cast-and-wrought processing (adem.202402330; adem.202401689). Although, presented for a specific alloy system, it is believed that a fair degree of the understanding of for a given processing route can be extended to other material classes too.

Currently, concerted global efforts are being made in order to address the growing need for identifying advanced materials that are sourced sustainably andprocessed into components through environmental-friendly routes. This is also reflected from the nature of accepted contributions to this collection that is highly international and represents relevant activities being carried out in different countries – this has been a really encouraging and heartening aspect of this special section. For this, as section editors, we are deeply indebted to the in-house editorial team of the journal which has assisted proactively to put this collection together. Finally, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors for their contributions and hope that the readers enjoy reading the articles in this collection!

With best regards

Ayan Bhowmik and Enrique Galindo-Nava