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> The study reveals that lower temperatures and a slower heating process can produce an alloy double the strength of steel, three times stronger than aluminium, and around twice as strong as the same alloy produced using conventional methods.

> [...]

> They tested the method on an alloy of titanium, hafnium, tantalum, niobium and zirconium, which formed a tightly connected internal nanostructure made up of three distinct components.

Any metallurgists care to comment? From my general knowledge - if you are using vastly-more-expensive exotic metals, plus fancy processing, then hitting 2X steel's or 3X aluminum's strength is really not remarkable.

1 comments

Not a metallurgist, but reading https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112..., table S4, page 36, they don’t primarily claim this is extraordinary. They list 20 other “alphabet soup” alloys of, ballpark, similar strength.

Also, FTA: “The real significance is not just this particular alloy, but the demonstration that atoms can self-organise into defect-free structures in a bulk metallic material, meaning a large, continuous piece of metal, not a thin coating, film or microscopic sample”

That PDF also says they had structures of size 30mm × 10mm × 2mm, cold-rolled to be 0,8mm thick. I wouldn’t know whether that’s more “bulk material” than those other papers accomplished.

(Looking at the complex production process, I do not see this getting wide usage soon, even if it scales to car-sized structures)