Ryan Timothy Ott

The scope of this CRADA involves the development of modeling approaches, predictive tools, and complementary experimental calibration and model validation data to better understand ductility in high entropy alloys. These activities will include materials sharing from Ames to RTX for analysis.

Permanent magnets produce magnetic fields and maintain the field even in the presence of an opposing magnetic field. They are widely used in electric machines, electronics, and medical devices. Part I reviews the conventional manufacturing processes for commercial magnets, including Nd-Fe-B, Sm-Co, alnico, and ferrite in cast and sintered forms. In Part II, bonding, emerging advanced manufacturing processes, as well as magnet recycling methods are briefly reviewed for their current status, challenges, and future directions.

Permanent magnets (PMs) produce magnetic fields and maintain the field even in the presence of an opposing magnetic field. Electrical machines using permanent magnets are more efficient than those without. Currently, all known strong magnets contain rare earth (RE) elements, and they are core components of a wide range of applications including electric vehicles and wind turbines. RE elements such as Nd and Dy have become critical materials due to the growing demand and constrained supply. Improving the manufacturing process is effective in mitigating the RE criticality issue by reducing waste and improving parts consistency. In this article, the state of the industry for PM is reviewed in detail considering both the technical and economic drivers. The importance of RE elements is discussed along with their economic importance to green energy. The conventional sintering and casting manufacturing processes for commercial magnets, including Nd-Fe-B, Sm-Co, Alnico, and ferrite, are described in detail.

A million times cooler: Elastocaloric materials can be used for solid-state cooling applications because they can pump heat out of a system using a reversible phase transformation. However, many such materials fail after a small number of cycles. Hou et al. found that laser melting of elastocaloric metals can create fatigue-resistant microstructures. A nickel-titanium–based alloy could be cycled a million times and still produce a cooling of about 4 kelvin. This processing method could improve elastocaloric performance and move us closer to using these materials more widely for solid-state cooling applications. Science , this issue p. 1116

Magnetostrictive materials exhibit a strain in the presence of a variable magnetic field. While they normally require large, highly oriented crystallographic grains for high strain values, metal additive manufacturing (3D printing) may be able to produce highly textured polycrystalline rods, with properties comparable to those manufactured using the more demanding free standing zone melting (FSZM) technique. Rods of Co_75.8Fe_24.2 and Co_63.7Fe_36.3 have been fabricated using the Laser engineered net shaping (LENS^TM) system to evaluate the performance of additively manufactured magnetic and magnetostrictive materials. The 76% Co sample showed an average magnetostriction (λ) of 86 ppm at a stress of 124 MPa; in contrast, the 64% Co sample showed only 27 ppm at the same stress. For direct comparison, a Co₆₇Fe₃₃ single crystal disk, also measured as part of this study, exhibited a magnetostriction value of 131 and 91 microstrain in the [100] and [111] directions, respectively, with a calculated polycrystalline value (λ_s) of 107 microstrain. Electron back scattered diffraction (EBSD) has been used to qualitatively link the performance with crystallographic orientation and phase information, showing only the BCC phase in the 76% Co sample, but three different phases (BCC, FCC, and HCP) in the 64% Co sample.

Many traditional approaches for strengthening steels typically come at the expense of useful ductility, a dilemma known as strength–ductility trade-off. New metallurgical processing might offer the possibility of overcoming this. Here we report that austenitic 316L stainless steels additively manufactured via a laser powder-bed-fusion technique exhibit a combination of yield strength and tensile ductility that surpasses that of conventional 316L steels. High strength is attributed to solidification-enabled cellular structures, low-angle grain boundaries, and dislocations formed during manufacturing, while high uniform elongation correlates to a steady and progressive work-hardening mechanism regulated by a hierarchically heterogeneous microstructure, with length scales spanning nearly six orders of magnitude. In addition, solute segregation along cellular walls and low-angle grain boundaries can enhance dislocation pinning and promote twinning. This work demonstrates the potential of additive manufacturing to create alloys with unique microstructures and high performance for structural applications.

The stress-induced martensitic phase transformation of shape memory alloys (SMAs) is the basis for elastocaloric cooling. Here we employ additive manufacturing to fabricate TiNi SMAs, and demonstrate compressive elastocaloric cooling in the TiNi rods with transformation latent heat as large as 20 J g ⁻¹ . Adiabatic compression on as-fabricated TiNi displays cooling Δ T as high as −7.5 °C with recoverable superelastic strain up to 5%. Unlike conventional SMAs, additive manufactured TiNi SMAs exhibit linear superelasticity with narrow hysteresis in stress–strain curves under both adiabatic and isothermal conditions. Microstructurally, we find that there are Ti ₂ Ni precipitates typically one micron in size with a large aspect ratio enclosing the TiNi matrix. A stress transfer mechanism between reversible phase transformation in the TiNi matrix and mechanical deformation in Ti ₂ Ni precipitates is believed to be the origin of the unique superelasticity behavior.