https://techxplore.com/news/2025-04-rare-crystal-strength-3d-metal.html
Andrew Iams saw something strange while looking through his electron microscope. He was examining a sliver of a new aluminum alloy at the atomic scale, searching for the key to its strength, when he noticed that the atoms were arranged in an extremely unusual pattern.
"That's when I started to get excited," said Iams, a materials research engineer, "because I thought I might be looking at a quasicrystal."
Not only did he find quasicrystals in this aluminum alloy, but he and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that these quasicrystals also make it stronger. They have published their findings in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds.
The alloy formed under the extreme conditions of 3D metal printing, a new way to make metal parts. Understanding this aluminum on the atomic scale will enable a whole new category of 3D-printed parts such as airplane components, heat exchangers and car chassis. It will also open the door to research on new aluminum alloys that use quasicrystals for strength.
Quasicrystals are like ordinary crystals but with a few key differences.
A traditional crystal is any solid made of atoms or molecules in repeating patterns. Table salt is a common crystal, for example. Salt's atoms connect to make cubes, and those microscopic cubes connect to form bigger cubes that are large enough to see with the naked eye.
There are only 230 possible ways for atoms to form repeating crystal patterns. Quasicrystals don't fit into any of them. Their unique shape lets them form a pattern that fills the space, but never repeats.
Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, discovered quasicrystals while on sabbatical at NIST in the 1980s. Many scientists at the time thought his research was flawed because the new crystal shapes he found weren't possible under the normal rules for crystals. But through careful research, Shechtman proved beyond a doubt that this new type of crystal existed, revolutionizing the science of crystallography and winning the chemistry Nobel Prize in 2011.
Working in the same building as Shechtman decades later, Andrew Iams found his own quasicrystals in 3D-printed aluminum.
There are a few different ways to 3D-print metals, but the most common is called powder bed fusion. It works like this: Metal powder is spread evenly in a thin layer. Then a powerful laser moves over the powder, melting it together. After the first layer is finished, a new layer of powder is spread on top and the process repeats. One layer at a time, the laser melts the powder into a solid shape. [...] Normal aluminum melts at temperatures of around 700 degrees C. The lasers in a 3D printer must raise the temperature much, much higher: past the metal's boiling point, 2,470 degrees C. This changes a lot of the properties of the metal, particularly since aluminum heats up and cools down faster than other metals.
In 2017, a team at HRL Laboratories, based in California, and UC Santa Barbara discovered a high-strength aluminum alloy that could be 3D-printed. They found that adding zirconium to the aluminum powder prevented the 3D-printed parts from cracking, resulting in a strong alloy.
The NIST researchers set out to understand this new, commercially available 3D-printed aluminum-zirconium alloy on the atomic scale.
"In order to trust this new metal enough to use in critical components such as military aircraft parts, we need a deep understanding of how the atoms fit together," said Zhang.
The NIST team wanted to know what made this metal so strong. Part of the answer, it turned out, was quasicrystals.
In metals, perfect crystals are weak. The regular patterns of perfect crystals make it easier for the atoms to slip past each other. When that happens, the metal bends, stretches or breaks. Quasicrystals break up the regular pattern of the aluminum crystals, causing defects that make the metal stronger.
Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jallcom.2025.180281
(Score: 2, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 12, @05:30PM
Sounds great, but: how hot do you have to get a quasi-crystal to anneal it?
Just asking because I have annealed a heat-treated aluminum car hood with turbo exhaust manifold heat, it didn't discolor the paint, but it did soften the sheet metal a lot.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday April 12, @05:57PM (1 child)
Probably asking WTF right now as sometimes trying to explain something complicated using non-technical language is more confusing than just using technical language. They can be symmetric under rotation but the key is they do NOT repeat under translation.
A pretty simple 2D version of this 3D idea, is Penrose tilings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling [wikipedia.org]
"Write me a Penrose tile generator" is a pretty entertaining programming problem thats not too long and not too short. My advice is start at the center and put the vertices into a "tree-like data structure" and extend the data structure until your vertex extends outside the viewing window, then try to render the data structure. IIRC all Penrose tiles are quadrilaterals so you can render every single tile as "two triangles".
"Write me a 3D quasicrystal generator" that outputs 3-d printer ready openscad files sounds like a giant headache, but is at least plausible.
There are other, somewhat more ridiculous looking, aperiodic tiles. Its a cool field because its quite approachable, in theory you can draw penrose tiles on any 80s home computer or better (assuming things now are better than the 80s, which is a stretch)
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday April 13, @01:08AM
Thanks for the insight of that Penrose tiling as to what's going on in alloys, and why particular ratios of atoms of different sizes may "crystallize" into forms having unique properties that their individual components lack.
I have often wondered how alloys work. Now I see there is no telling how many ways atoms may "self-assemble" during crystallization if there are several sizes of atoms in the pool to choose from...like why solders behave differently than their constituent elements. Why 63/37 is "eutectic".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday April 12, @06:09PM (2 children)
An open question I don't immediately know the answer to is the difference between a metallic glass and a quasicrystal. Other than they can be made the same way by super rapidly cooling strange metal alloys.
AFAIK if a chunk is 51% quasicrystal they call it a chunk of quasicrystal and if its 51% metallic glass they call it a chunk of MG.
There is the obvious implication that if its pretty much impossible to make bulk chunks of metallic glass that would seem to imply its impossible to use that manufacturing process to make bulk quasicrystals.
Every once in awhile someone suggests making wide ribbons of MG in vacuum then cold welding them together in vacuum to make bulk MG but that all seems rather impractical. Maybe someones done it since the last time I researched this topic. I wonder if that would work for bulk quasicrystal like in the article.
It's wild that this late in our scientific civilization there's still basic research to be done thats incredibly simple to explain but very hard to do, like cool liquid metal down faster than a million degrees per second. How can "freeze something really quick" still be an open basic research question in 2025?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, @04:41AM
>... like cool liquid metal down faster than a million degrees per second.
Or, work the problem the other way, look for an alloy (or mixture) that gives something like the desired properties when cooled at a rate that is achievable for thicker sections.
There is some prior art, for example, alloy tool steel can be quenched fairly slowly (in water, oil and even air), up to 1 cm (~1/2") thickness and give very good properties all the way through, not just near the surface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 14, @09:01AM
I also wonder how much of such stuff is already long known but kept top secret for "national security" etc. e.g. they might have top secret methods of making quasicrystal jet engine blades etc. Meanwhile the single crystal stuff is "kind of" public knowledge:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-single-crystal [americanscientist.org]