MIT develops 5x stronger aluminium alloy for Additive Manufacturing
Engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, report that they have developed an aluminium alloy suitable for Additive Manufacturing that can reportedly withstand high temperatures and is 5x stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminium.
As well as aluminium, the alloy consists of other elements that the MIT team selected using a combination of simulations and machine learning to narrow down the possible combinations of materials. While traditional methods would require the simulation of over 1 million possible combinations of materials, the engineers’ new machine learning approach meant that they needed to evaluate only forty compositions before identifying their ideal mix for a high-strength, additively manufacturable Al alloy.
When the researchers additively manufactured the alloy and tested the resulting material, the team found that, as predicted, the aluminium alloy was as strong as the strongest aluminium alloys that are manufactured today using traditional casting methods.
The researchers anticipate that the new Al alloy could be made into stronger, lighter and more temperature-resistant products (e.g. jet engine blades.) Fan blades are traditionally cast from titanium – a material that is more than 50% heavier and up to 10x costlier than aluminium – or made from composites.
“If we can use lighter, high-strength material, this would save a considerable amount of energy for the transportation industry,” stated Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, who led the work as a postdoc at MIT and is now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, added, “Because 3D printing can produce complex geometries, save material, and enable unique designs, we see this printable alloy as something that could also be used in advanced vacuum pumps, high-end automobiles, and cooling devices for data centres.”
The details of this study were published in Advanced Materials.
www.mit.edu
