3 ms·
Commonplace aluminum alloy 7068 is also "ultrastrong" (~710-750MPa, more than the 700MPa in the paper,) and ductile. WWII-vintage Japanese duralumin (Al-7075)
by A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
Commonplace aluminum alloy 7068 is also "ultrastrong" (~710-750MPa, more than the 700MPa in the paper,) and ductile.
WWII-vintage Japanese duralumin (Al-7075) is nearly as strong (~600MPa), and very ductile. It's also nearly 100 years old.
I guess the innovation here is that they're making this alloy with additive manufacturing techniques? It's not that noteworthy, IMO. It would be jaw-dropping if it were a 1000MPa alloy -- that's like the Holy Grail for aluminum -- but they're still far from that mark.
- practicemaths 2y agoIn the abstract: "Light-weight, high-strength, aluminum (Al) alloys have widespread industrial applications. However, most commercially available high-strength Al alloys, like AA 7075, are not suitable for additive manufacturing due to their high susceptibility to solidification cracking."
- andrewwwalkerr 2y agoOh neato! I studied this in Grad school back in 2014!! "the Innovation" is that high strength alloys like 2xxx and 7xxx are notorious for their "unweldable" nature. So to report a fairly rigorous investigation of such a material being successfully processed via PBF is interesting. There are essentially 3 ways to do it, different composition, grain refiner, or pulse shaping. They seem to be targetting some combo of the first two. The work is complete, but also very early..(limited macro mechanical work) small scale mech props work can be very very different than practical size structures like a E8 coupon or fatigue test artifacts The other issue is that creating new alloys is largely academic.. as the as qualification and supply chain constraints in most performance driven industries with any real market make it a non-starter Not to say it's not interesting though, I'm excited to see where they take the work next!