Strengthened by Chaos, New Super-Hard Materials Will Stir Steel Together
A nationwide collaboration led by researchers at Duke University’s Center for Autonomous Materials Design is working to synthesize inexpensive materials hard enough to literally stir two pieces of steel together with little wear and tear.
Funded by a five-year, $7.5 million grant through the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) competition, the team will also develop a suite of AI-materials tools capable of the on-demand designing of similar materials with properties tailored to a wide range of applications.
The class of so-called “high-entropy” materials derives enhanced stability from a chaotic mixture of atoms rather than relying solely on the orderly atomic structure of conventional materials. After first demonstrating this approach with carbides in 2018, the researchers will now look to add borides into the irregular self-organized structures to produce
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IMAGE: A Tetris-like grid of high-entropy carbides (blue) and borides (red) is expected to produce super-hard materials that can literally stir two pieces of steel together. view more
Credit: Duke University
A nationwide collaboration led by researchers at Duke University s Center for Autonomous Materials Design is working to synthesize inexpensive materials hard enough to literally stir two pieces of steel together with little wear and tear.
Funded by a five-year, $7.5 million grant through the Department of Defense s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) competition, the team will also develop a suite of AI-materials tools capable of the on-demand designing of similar materials with properties tailored to a wide range of applications.