I'm reminded a bit of NASA's work with 3D printing high temperature superalloys [0]. One difference is, NASA's work uses Hot isostatic pressing [1], a post-pro

I'm reminded a bit of NASA's work with 3D printing high temperature superalloys [0]. One difference is, NASA's work uses Hot isostatic pressing [1], a post-processing step that homogenizes the part. Whereas it sounds like this work is trying to dial in the composition such that they can get acceptable performance without any post-processing. Tesla went through a similar thing with their Gigacastings. The only reason making such large die-cast parts is practical for them is, they put a lot of work into the material science to come up with a composition they gave the desired properties without any post-processing such as heat treatment. The really cool thing NASA is doing, though, is coating the metal powder with nanoscale ceramic particles, which get dispersed throughout the part. That's something that can't be done with traditional manufacturing at all (the ceramic particles would separate out of molten metal rather than staying dispersed). With 3D printing, each little melt pool is too small for the ceramic particles to migrate too far, and after HIP they end up at the grain boundaries. Using that approach, they developed an alloy with higher ultimate tensile strength and vastly higher (x1000) resistance to creep at high temperatures (1100 C) compared to the best available superalloys. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TapNnQZ9Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TapNnQZ9Ek [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_isostatic_pressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_isostatic_pressing