4. The future of heat treatment

In the medium term, developments in the field of heat treatment will mainly concern complete control of the chain from virgin material to the final part.

The main focus will be on modeling the various stages of thermal or thermomechanical treatment, taking into account the laws of material behavior and, for example, the effect of local strain-hardening due to internal stresses.

Eventually, these approaches should make it possible to control processes in such a way as to optimize the local microstructures of parts, provided the appropriate tools are available.

A first application could be turbine disks with a dual structure, where the hot parts operating in creep would be coarse-grained, and the parts operating in fatigue would be fine-grained. It should be noted that experiments have been successfully carried out...