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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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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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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Nature Materials thanks Niaz Abdolrahim, Alexis Deschamps and Xiaochun Li for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Bai, X., Xie, H., Zhang, X. et al. Heat-resistant super-dispersed oxide strengthened aluminium alloys. Nat. Mater. 23, 747–754 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01884-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01884-2
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