Processing of Aluminides

Intermetallic compounds of nickel, iron, and titanium with aluminum have been studied extensively. Research on these materials has been published in the proceedings of several symposia and in journal articles. Detailed articles describing the development of nickel aluminides (Liu 1994; Noebe, Bowman, and Nathal 1994), iron aluminides (McKamey 1994), and titanium aluminides (Froes and Suryanarayana 1994) are the subject of other chapters in this book. In order to take advantage of their unique properties in various applications, methods for their processing need to be identified. In addition, the selected processing methods need to be implemented in the real-world manufacturing sector for the economical production of these materials. The processing of these materials is possible by both casting and powder metallurgy methods. The powder metallurgy processing is described in detail in a separate chapter (German and Iacocca 1994) of this book. This chapter deals with the processing techniques involving melting and casting into net or near-net shapes or ingots for secondary breakdown.