Abstract
The attractive mechanical properties of nickel-based superalloys primarily arise from an assembly of γ′ precipitates with desirable size, volume fraction, morphology and spatial distribution. In addition, the solutioning cooling rate after super solvus heat treatment is critical for controlling the features of γ′ precipitates. However, the correlation between these multidimensional parameters and mechanical hardness has not been well established to date. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images with different γ′ precipitates were investigated in this study, and artificial neural network (ANN) method was used to build a microstructure-mechanical property model. The critical step in this work is to extract different microstructural features from hundreds of SEM images. In order to improve the accuracy of prediction, the cooling rate was also considered as the input. In this work, the methodology was proved to be capable of bridging microstructural features and mechanical properties under the inspiration of material genome spirit.
