Printable aluminum alloy sets strength records, may enable lighter aircraft parts.
Incorporating machine learning, MIT engineers developed a way to 3D print alloys that are much stronger than conventionally manufactured versions.
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.
“Because 3D printing can produce complex geometries, save material, and enable unique designs, we see this printable alloy as something that could also be used in advanced vacuum pumps, high-end automobiles, and cooling devices for data centers,” adds John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.