High Performance Ferrium Steels for Aerospace Gearing and Bearing Applications

Certain aerospace bearing components used in jet turbine engines suffer from standstill corrosion, and alloy development to date has not been able to address this issue due to the difficulty of balancing corrosion resistance and the high performance that is necessary for these applications. Integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) technologies are effective tools to rapidly design and develop novel alloys and achieve target property goals, and these tools have been successfully utilized in the development and deployment of high-performance aerospace steels. This paper begins with an overview of ICME tools and the methodology employed to utilize these tools in designing aerospace gear steels followed by a review of the design and development of a novel, high-performance, solution-nitridable bearing steel. The work describes the microstructural design concepts that were developed to achieve the targeted properties and presents the results of characterization and testing on a commercial-scale heat of the finalized alloy composition.