Aluminum is a very good lightweight material and many soft drinks like to make cans with it, but the disadvantages of aluminum are also obvious - too brittle. The good news is that researchers at Purdue University have developed A new type of aluminum alloy that dramatically improves material strength by introducing 'faults' into the crystal structure of the metal, in addition to making the strength of the new aluminum alloy stainless steel Can also be used for corrosion-resistant coating.
Researchers prepared a sample, left for Sichuang Xue, right for Qiang Li.
At a microscopic level, metals are composed of layers of crystal atoms that are repeatedly stacked and suffer from "stacking faults" when one of the layers is missing.
If there are two faults, they are called "twin boundaries" or "nanotwins." If they reach 9, they are called '9R'.
Interestingly, these stacked faults actually make the material even more intense, and Purdue researchers hope to include both 'twin twins' and '9R' properties in parallel.
The aluminum alloy will be analyzed by transmission electron microscopy to study its crystalline structure.
The difficulty is that the metal has a "high stacking fault energy," meaning the material tends to 'self-correct.' Two new study authors, Xinghang Zhang, said:
Earlier it was confirmed that it is very difficult to introduce a 'double boundary' to the aluminum material, and the introduction of the '9R phase' is even more difficult because its 'stacking fault energy' is too high.
Even so, they overcame the challenge of introducing both features into the new aluminum, improving the strength and ductility of the material while also improving its thermal stability.
The new aluminum alloy invented by Purdue researchers has the strength characteristics of shoulder to shoulder stainless steel.
To introduce '9R' into the new aluminum, scientists used two different techniques, one of which was 'shock-induced', the use of lasers to bombard ultrathin aluminum flakes and silica particles.
Thesis, Sichuang Xue, said: 'We found that this technique can induce a' 9R 'deformation of tens of nanometers in width. The second technique is magnetron sputtering.
The process can introduce iron atoms into the crystal structure of aluminum to create the highest-strength aluminum alloy material to date, and the team says the process can scale to industrial production.
The new technology is expected to be applied in the corrosion-resistant coatings for electronic equipment and vehicles. "Xinghang Zhang said:" These results show how to make aluminum alloys with stainless steel shoulders, which have a lot of potential commercial impact. "
Details of the 'shock-induced' study have been published in a recent issue of Nature Communications.
Details of the 'magnetron sputtering' study are published in the recently published Advanced Materials journal.
