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Heat-resistant super-dispersed oxide strengthened aluminium alloys

Nature Materials (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Oxided-dispersion-strengthened (ODS) alloys are promising high-strength materials used in extreme environments such as high-temperature and radiation tolerance applications. Until now, ODS alloys have been developed for reducible metals by chemical processing methods, but there are no commercially available ODS alloys for unreducible metals, namely, Al, Mg, Ti, Zr and so on, owing to the challenge of uniformly dispersing oxide particles in these alloys by traditional techniques. Here we present a strategy to achieve ODS Al alloys containing highly dispersive 5 nm MgO nanoparticles by powder metallurgy, using nanoparticles that have in situ-grown graphene-like coatings and hence largely reduced surface energy. Notably, the densely dispersed MgO nanoparticles, which have a fully coherent relationship with an Al matrix, show effective suppression of interfacial vacancy diffusion, thus leading to unprecedented strength (~200 MPa) and creep resistance at temperatures as high as 500 °C. Our processing approach should enable the dispersion of ultrafine nanoparticles in a wide range of alloys for high-temperature-related applications.

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Fig. 1: Uniform dispersion of MgO NPs in an Al matrix.
Fig. 2: Mechanical properties of the as-extruded ODS alloys.
Fig. 3: Creep resistance of the as-extruded ODS alloys.
Fig. 4: MgO/Al interface with a cube-on-cube orientation relationship.
Fig. 5: GB stability and creep behaviours.

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Data availability

All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are available in this article or its Supplementary Information. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Chinese National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, grant no. 52025015 (C.H.), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant nos. U23A20546 (N.Z.), 52071230 (C.H.), 52130105 (N.Z.) and 52101181 (X.Z.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Composite and Functional Materials, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Xiangren Bai, Haonan Xie, Xiang Zhang, Dongdong Zhao, Xudong Rong, Enzuo Liu, Naiqin Zhao & Chunnian He

  2. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China

    Shenbao Jin

  3. Key Laboratory of Advanced Ceramics and Machining Technology, Ministry of Education, Tianjin, China

    Naiqin Zhao & Chunnian He

  4. Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), Tianjin, China

    Naiqin Zhao & Chunnian He

  5. Joint School of National University of Singapore and Tianjin University, International Campus of Tianjin University, Binhai New City, China

    Chunnian He

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Contributions

C.H. and X.Z. initiated and supervised the project. X.B. prepared the materials and carried out most of the microscopy experiments. X.B. and X.R. conducted the XRD measurements and mechanical property testing. D.Z. and S.J. did the APT examination and data analysis. H.X. and E.L. did the DFT calculations. N.Z., D.Z. and X.R. provided helpful discussions. All authors extensively discussed the data. C.H., X.Z. and X.B. wrote the paper. All authors critically reviewed the results and edited the paper drafted by the corresponding authors.

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Correspondence to Xiang Zhang or Chunnian He.

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Nature Materials thanks Niaz Abdolrahim, Alexis Deschamps and Xiaochun Li for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–17, Tables 1 and 2, and Notes 1–4.

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Bai, X., Xie, H., Zhang, X. et al. Heat-resistant super-dispersed oxide strengthened aluminium alloys. Nat. Mater. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01884-2

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