Printable Aluminum Alloy Sets Strength Records

A new metal AM aluminum alloy.
 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have developed a printable aluminum alloy that can withstand high temperatures and is five times stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminum. The new printable metal is made from a mix of aluminum and other elements that the team identified using a combination of simulations and machine learning, which significantly pruned the number of possible combinations of materials to search through. While traditional methods would require simulating over 1 million possible combinations of materials, the team’s new machine learning-based approach needed only to evaluate 40 possible compositions before identifying an ideal mix for a high-strength, printable aluminum alloy.

When they printed the alloy and tested the resulting material, the team confirmed that, as predicted, the aluminum alloy was as strong as the strongest aluminum alloys that are manufactured today using traditional casting methods. The researchers envision that the new printable aluminum could be made into stronger, more lightweight and temperature-resistant products, such as fan blades in jet engines. Fan blades are traditionally cast from titanium — a material that is more than 50 percent heavier and up to 10 times costlier than aluminum — or made from advanced composites. “If we can use lighter, high-strength material, this would save a considerable amount of energy for the transportation industry,” says Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, who led the work as a postdoc at MIT and is now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.