| Oh neato!
I studied this in Grad school back in 2014!! "the Innovation" is that high strength alloys like 2xxx and 7xxx are notorious for their "unweldable" nature. So to report a fairly rigorous investigation of such a material being successfully processed via PBF is interesting. There are essentially 3 ways to do it, different composition, grain refiner, or pulse shaping. They seem to be targetting some combo of the first two. The work is complete, but also very early..(limited macro mechanical work) small scale mech props work can be very very different than practical size structures like a E8 coupon or fatigue test artifacts The other issue is that creating new alloys is largely academic.. as the as qualification and supply chain constraints in most performance driven industries with any real market make it a non-starter Not to say it's not interesting though, I'm excited to see where they take the work next! |