MPa is a Materials Engineering Company that provides specialized mechanical testing, analysis and consulting services for high temperature applications. These include all applications where time-dependent deformation and fracture processes occur such as energy conversion systems based on steam turbines, gas turbines, jet engines and high performance automobile engines, as well as primary heat transfer components such as boiler tubes and furnace components. Creep, fatigue, thermal fatigue and gaseous environmental attack are frequently involved in the failure of high temperature components. Materials covered are all metallic alloys operating at high fractions of their melting temperatures, structural ceramics, engineering plastics and advanced composites.
There are three primary technical objectives for manufactured components operating at high temperatures:
To address these needs MPa has recently developed a new testing and analysis technique based on accelerated testing as an alternative to long time creep tests. Termed Design for Performance this methodology uses short time high precision tests to evaluate the consequences of microstructural evolution and damage development, rather than attempt to incorporate the changes in the test as in the traditional approach.
We are currently using this approach on a wide range of high temperature materials including metallic alloys, ceramics, polymers and composites. In addition to major support from EPRI we have worked with GE, ABB, KAPL, DOW, EXXON, ARCO, ELLIOTT, ORNL, IHI, Rolls Royce, Siemens-Westinghouse, Teledyne Ryan, Hitachi, Johnson-Matthey and numerous gas turbine users. The work has primarily addressed problems of materials development and component life assessment, but has also been used for process optimization, acceptance testing, and design. As such we have examined and reported results on a wide range of superalloys and steels. We can, for example, rapidly determine the best chemistry or heat treatment for optimal high temperature properties. Testing of critical locations in gas turbine blades is being used to provide support for remaining life assessment. We have shown how the approach may be used directly in design analysis, both for setting of stresses and for direct input into finite element analysis codes.
In addition to providing these services, MPa is now prepared to offer a product to our customers in the form of testing specifications, analysis software and expertise to allow companies to develop their own in-house capability. Please review the rest of this site, and contact MPa for further information.
In a related effort we are now developing, with DOE support, a high temperature materials database based on the CES software package.
A recent paper provides an example of the accelerated testing approach.
Additional papers in pdf format may be downloaded:
See also the academic web site at UCSB
Accelerated Testing
Design for Performance
Creep-Rupture Database
Publications
pdw