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Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with that format, but it's not rare for alloys to have half a dozen or more alloying elements.

That notation is used sometimes in the literature on model alloys. This does not survive contact with engineering, where they tweak the formula to a hundredth of a percent.

Even with a precise formula that's only 20% of the work. With these superalloys the hard part is getting them to crystalize correctly so that all of the elements fit in the right spots in the matrix and stay there while it cools. A lot of them require seed crystals to form, which complicates the problem.

That’s why this laser sinterable superalloy is really interesting.

Oh yes, of course. I only referred to the notation. Additive manufacturing adds tons of issues on top of the basic problem of getting the alloy to crystallise in the right form (which we’ve had to deal with for millennia).

But the field is developing rapidly and we are already talking about complex concentrated superalloys. There are spectacular advances happening right now at every level of alloy development. The fact that additive manufacturing is far out of equilibrium is a problem for now, but this could become an advantage instead with the right alloys.

This is not a superalloy (i.e. turbine blade material), just a strong normal aluminum alloy that can be additively manufactured.

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