The nanoscale secret to stronger alloys
Sunday, August 7, 2011 - 12:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Long before they knew they were doing it as long ago as the Wright Brother's first airplane engine metallurgists were incorporating nanoparticles in aluminum to make a strong, hard, heat-resistant alloy. The process is called solid-state precipitation, in which, after the melt has been quickly cooled, atoms of alloying metals migrate through a solid matrix and gather themselves in dispersed particles measured in billionths of a meter, only a few-score atoms wide.