Evaluation of property scatter of Ni-base alloy in 738 LC

In high temperature creep testing the conventionally cast alloy IN 738 LC exhibits a comparably large property scatter which requires high safety margins in design and dimensioning and subsequently causes an incomplete exploitation of the materials potential. The reasons for this property scatter were investigated and traced back to different influencing factors. Parallel to investigations on the microstructure of post-exposure material and conventional scatter band analysis, artificial neural networks were successfully applied to discover relations between the chemical composition of the individual melt and the position of the corresponding test results within the global scatter band.