World-First 'Super Alloy' Could Transform the Way Metals Are Made
Comments
fwlr
anenefan
Interesting for products where the resulting alloy just needs machining - lathing, milling, drilling etc, but more interesting will be what processes will be needed to weld or form such alloyed metals.
bediger4000
Existing high-strength alloys like MP35N are already extraordinarily difficult to machine. The "super alloy" in the story is said to have a compressive yield strength of 2 gigapascals, which is about MP35N tensile yield. Sounds like this "super alloy" isn't that much stronger than existing high strength alloys. It does have some fairly exotic alloying elements, tantalum, niobium and hafnium that probably don't come cheap. This super alloy will be used only in a very few applications.
anenefan
I have not struck MP35N afaik before, and interesting to see its use in commercial settings, and even available as bolts and nuts. Certainly not fun to machine [1]
It's hard to know just how much stronger this new processing of the alloy is than other common high strength alloys, as they list compressive yield and not tensile yield strength ... that's if the person writing didn't get the two terms confused.
As a note, I use duckduckgo and smirked somewhat at its search assist results for the few efforts to find the compressive yield of Bisalloy 400 (something I've had to drill) - checking out the listed sources it was clear it had mistakenly used the tensile yield ...
As an illustration for the differences, I found a page [2] for 4140 alloy and similar yield strengths. 4140 is reasonably workable, drilling isn't the greatest amount of effort either before it's tempered and annealed.
[1] https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/threads/milling-mp3...
[2] https://amesweb.info/Materials/Steel-Tensile-Yield-Strength-...
Presumably, some initial information was fed into the start of this reporting process. Multiple stages of this process had near-total incomprehension of the information yet performed full ingestion and reconstitution of it anyway, leading to this terminally-confused output.