Manufacturing of High Entropy Alloys

High entropy alloys (HEAs) have generated interest in recent years due to their unique positioning within the alloy world. By incorporating a number of elements in high proportion they have high configurational entropy, and thus they hold the promise of interesting and useful properties such as enhanced strength and phase stability. The present study investigates the microstructure of two single-phase face-centered cubic (FCC) HEAs, CoCrFeNi and CoCrFeNiMn, with special attention given to melting, homogenization and thermo-mechanical processing. Large-scale ingots were made by vacuum induction melting to avoid the extrinsic factors inherent in small-scale laboratory button samples. A computationally based homogenization heat treatment was applied to both alloys in order to eliminate segregation due to normal ingot solidification. The alloys fabricated well, with typical thermo-mechanical processing parameters being employed.