New metal alloys overcome strength-ductility tradeoff
For centuries — in fact, since the Bronze Age began some 7,000 years ago — the creation of new metallic alloys has mostly been a trial-and-error process. Traditionally, one metal constituent was always dominant, with others making up a small fraction of the recipe. But a new study suggests a novel strategy that could help direct efforts to overturn this ancient lore, opening the way for new classes of alloys with previously unseen combinations of properties. The new approach is described in a paper this week in the journal Nature, by C. Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Career Development Professor of Metallurgy in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and four others at the Max Planck Institute in Dusseldorf, Germany. The new approach, Tasan says, also challenges the conventional wisdom that improving the strength of a metal alloy is always a tradeoff that results in a loss of ductility —...