Tim Smith on GRX-810: NASA’s Breakthrough Superalloy for Additive Manufacturing

Jet turbine engineers need components that can survive some of the most extreme conditions imaginable, like emperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and for years, no off-the-shelf alloy survived the task. The answer came from NASA Glenn Research Center in the form of GRX-810, a purpose-built oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) superalloy designed for additive manufacturing. Capable of delivering creep lifetimes of over 6,000 hours in testing and requiring no special print parameters, GRX-810 is setting a new benchmark for what high-temperature metal AM can achieve.

Tim Smith, a Research Materials Engineer at NASA Glenn, was one of the minds who helped bring GRX-810 from a concept to a fully commercialized material, recognized as NASA’s Commercial Invention of the Year. To learn about the material’s development, 3Dnatives spoke with Tim, who will also be a panelist at the virtual ADDITIV Metals on June 10. Read the full interview below, and if you want to hear more from Tim, register for ADDITIV Metals HERE. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

GRX-810 was designed specifically for 3D printing (Photo Credit: Jef Janis/NASA)

3DN: Can you tell us about the GRX-810 superalloy? Why it was created and what necessitated its development?

This was an alloy development project that started almost seven or eight years ago. It came about because engineers here at NASA Glenn wanted to use 3D printing to explore new geometries for a combustor dome used in jet turbine engines. The problem was that it had to operate at very high temperatures, around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,100 degrees Celsius.