alt Hacker NewsWorld-First 'Super Alloy' Could Transform the Way Metals Are Made
Comments
This is really cool metallurgy. They start with an alloy and deform it and because of elemental size mismatch they can cause the alloy to self assemble into nanoscale crystals with three different structures
The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec4995
As an aside, “super alloy” is not the best wording choice on the part of the author of this sciencealert article, superalloys are an established alloy family that follow a different design strategy and have a very different composition profile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superalloy
This will be very useful if they can find a way to make it without something that costs $12,000 per kg.
I guess I'm not impressed that some totally different alloy is stronger than steel. You can't change both method and alloy and claim that the method is better. Presumably the paper compared the same alloy using the normal and the new method, but this article omitted that essential information, and in so doing destroyed the result.
Presumably, some initial information was fed into the start of this reporting process. Multiple stages of this process had near-total incomprehension of the information yet performed full ingestion and reconstitution of it anyway, leading to this terminally-confused output.
So Gundarium alloy is getting closer to reality?
Interesting for products where the resulting alloy just needs machining - lathing, milling, drilling etc, but more interesting will be what processes will be needed to weld or form such alloyed metals.
>It's two times stronger than steel, three times stronger than aluminum, and twice as strong as the same alloy made in a conventional way.
Ugh. The most basic bitch metallurgy discussion possible.
Oh! It’s stronger than aluminum?! So is bronze, we’ve hard that for awhile! Is the new material lighter than aluminum while being stronger? Is it corrosion resistant? Is it machinable? Can you weld it? Does it oxidize? Does it lose all its strength under moderate heat? Does it temper, do you have to temper it? Is it inert? Can it extrude? Can it be formed into billet or just plate/bar? Does it shatter?
Oh but 2x stronger than <some steel> and 3x stronger than <some aluminum>… is that 2024 aluminum? 6061 common, 7075 aero? Is the steel cold roll or 600-series inconel?
This is an area where if you don’t know what you are talking about, STFU, because anything you say is just going to be embarrassing. This is a you don’t know what you don’t know topic.
As to “high entropy metals”, I’ve heard about this for awhile, I would expect it to be stupid low yield, stupid expensive, and hard to use. There is probably some grade-40 titanium ultra alloy that could make the same “strength” claims but no articles about it because it’s “cost prohibitive”.
… I count this as clickbait metallurgy. No thanks.
Now all we need to do is build an invincible giant robot out of it, to protect peace and justice from the forces of evil.
Hm I just read an article here recently that was saying that Americans had an edge in jet turbine blades production over china because Americans figured out how to make single crystal jet turbines using this same method. I wonder what the difference is.