Scientists at MIT create mathematical model to predict alloy characteristics
innovationnewsdaily.com
innovationnewsdaily.com
There's some (in my opinion) more interesting work going on at MIT[3] in ceramics, where machine learning is being used to predict new material properties. Unfortunately, the group hasn't gotten published in Science or Nature yet, so I don't have much to link to. However, ceramics both are more variable than metals and less well known (one of my professors liked to call it the 'Wild West' of materials), so the big results are likely to be more exciting when they do arrive.
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[1] All common metals are formed of arrays of tiny crystals, however the metals described here have much smaller crystals than usual (nanometers instead of microns). This strengthens the metals as the movement of crystal defects is the main source of weakness in metals. Defects can easily move within a single crystal, but not so much between them, so reducing the size of crystals significantly hampers defect movement and thus strengthens the metal. Unfortunately, crystals don't like being this small and so preventing them from growing is a serious concern and the focus of this research.
[2] The new theory is actually pretty exciting, and seem to expose significant flaws in the old theory. I don't understand it well enough to say much more though.
"The school of 'ALCHMI' argues this is what gives the alloy property X, while the school 'HOCUS'says, its the sudden drop off at xx deg in the Iron-carbon phase diagram ...."
Maybe it wasn't that bad, but it never felt like a precise science to me, at least compared to the other subjects you take as Mechi, like Math, Dynamics or Controls.
The abstract (Thank you montecarl) only talks about "nanostructured metals" though. I wonder if this scales.
To answer your question though, the model doesn't scale, but that's because the problem doesn't scale. We're talking about a bulk sample of metal made up of crystals that are, according to the old theory, too small to be stable. Once the crystals become larger, the old theory adequately describes their stability.