[adrian_b]

Indeed, such "high-entropy" alloys have been known for decades, but they are rarely used because of high cost.

There is only one new fact in this research, which is however very interesting.

By mechanical working of the alloy, its crystal structure has changed to a mixture of grains with 3 different crystal structures, instead of being composed of homogeneous grains, like most solid-solution metallic alloys.

This change of crystal structure induced by mechanical working has doubled the strength of an already strong alloy, which is the novel and interesting result of this research.

The reason why this could happen is that the alloy contains similar amounts of metals that normally have distinct crystal structures. In alloys with a dominant metal, the alloy tends to have the same crystal structure as that metal, but in this alloy none of the crystal structures is preferred, so the grains take one of them randomly, during deep mechanical deformation.