© Lunghammer/TU Graz
“Just like with a good cooking recipe, we want to know exactly what ingredients, quantities, temperatures, sequences and times are needed to obtain in the end a product with exactly the properties desired”, says Argentinian-born Maria Cecilia Poletti, who heads the new “Christian Doppler Laboratory for Design of High-Performance Alloys by Thermomechanical Processing at the Graz University of Technology.
When metals are pressed to create an alloy, a lot of things happen to their microstructure. How strong, resilient, heatproof and chemically homogeneous an end product is in the long run, for instance a turbine blade, depends very much on the thermomechanical loads during production. However, for high-performance alloys, like those used in transport, many detailed questions are still unresolved.
High-performance alloys play an important role for technological progress in lightweight construction and in the automotive sector. The Christian Doppler laboratory will specifically focus on physical phenomena that occur during the production and application of non-ferrous alloys such as titanium, nickel and aluminum alloys. The corporate partners are the metal producer Nemak based in Mexico and Linz as well as the Austrian company Böhler Schmiedetechnik.
