New material gives copper superalloy-like strength
81 comments
·April 28, 2025A_D_E_P_T
nine_k
To put this into perspective: nickel is approximately 2x as expensive as copper, and cobalt is 5-6 times as expensive, and the major cobalt producers are all politically problematic (DR Congo, China, Russia).
ZeroGravitas
Isn't cobalt basically a byproduct of copper mining though?
Googled it and the Cobolt Institute says:
> the vast majority is produced as a by-product from large scale copper and nickel mines
sandworm101
In the use cases imagined for this material, the cost of the base metals is basically irrelevant. Something like a jet turbine blade might have maybe 10$ worth of material, but after machining and a hundred other steps is worth 100x that ammount. A heatshield for a hypersonic missile? Maybe a kilo of copper, but perhaps a 1m+ purchase price
nine_k
More affordable price seriously widens the range of applications, and thus the total addressable market. Not using hazardous substances like berillium additionally helps.
imtringued
This isn't true actually. Aerospace grade aluminum, for example, is much more expensive and since you want to minimize weight with ortho- and iso-grids, you're throwing at least 50% of the material away. Another problem is that you not only need to consider the "base metal" of the part you're cutting, but also the cost of the tools that do the cutting (ignore the machine itself). You're consuming a lot of expensive endmills to get rid of the material.
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aussieguy1234
Australia is the fourth largest producer. There are efforts to scale it up, although there are issues with that https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-24/critical-minerals-ele...
nandomrumber
For reference, regular old structural steel is 250 to 350 MPa tensile yield strength.
A_D_E_P_T
Mild steel for rebar, sure. But even the average tool steel exceeds ~1400MPa, and today's most advanced maraging steels can hit 3000MPa. Steel wire can get even stronger than that.
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Beretta_Vexee
It does not mention corrosion resistance or thermal fatigue at all, but a copper-based alloy with good dimensional stability and thermal conductivity could be an interesting alternative to Inconel alloys for heat exchanger tubes.
xxs
The article mentions one year test at 800C being annealed. I suppose you meant thermal cycles?
Beretta_Vexee
English is not my native language. I am referring to fatigue caused by thermal cycling. Annealing for one year is done to test the chemical stability of the alloy and ensure that there is no migration or segregation of alloy elements.
There may be unstable hydrodynamic phenomena in a pipe or heat exchanger, which generates a large number of thermal cycles. Such as the instability of a vortex in a mixing or heat exchange zone.
This is a different ageing mechanism. It is very complicated and time-consuming to test in the laboratory.
ReptileMan
Can you make decent bronze age sword out of it?
xxs
1000MPa is similar to the bolts used in automotive industry, so totally - but not with a bronze age style metallurgy.
szundi
[dead]
jbay808
This might be a great alternative to beryllium copper for the spring contact element in high-current electrical connectors.
wpollock
Could this material be a cost-effective replacement for stainless steel? I'm thinking of applications where the antimicrobial properties of copper would be beneficial.
fc417fc802
I'm struggling to think of applications where both strength and antimicrobial properties matter. Isn't it usually one or the other?
kragen
Hot water heater tanks, dishes, silverware, handrails, air conditioner heat exchangers? But in a lot of cases you can just electroplate a strong alloy with copper, brass, or silver.
elchananHaas
The high temperature talked about in the article is close to 800 Celsius. That far exceeds home or even most industrial appliances. The primary use would be in turbines where the combination of strength and heat conductivity can keep the blades from melting and improve efficiency.
thfuran
None of those need high strength.
wpollock
I was actually thinking of sinks, shower heads, door knobs, stuff like that.
ajuc
Kitchen knife?
fc417fc802
I doubt antimicrobial matters much there (don't you wash your knives before and after use?) but the idea of a copper knife without significant loss of strength is neat. I want one already.
bbarnett
Sword!
sandworm101
Brewing beer. Pharmaceuticals. Any industrial use of bacteria under pressure.
adrian_b
It is unlikely that it has better corrosion properties than a cheaper copper alloy, like copper-nickel alloy.
This new alloy is useful only for high-temperature applications, like turbines and heat exchangers, where its main advantage over the existing alloys (based on nickel or cobalt) is its much higher thermal conductivity.
Moreover, the kinds of stainless steel that have little or no nickel content (e.g. ferritic, martensitic, superferritic, duplex, manganese-austenitic) will always have a price several times lower than any copper alloy.
This copper alloy will be rather expensive due to the high cost of tantalum. However the content in tantalum is small, so the price will remain acceptable for its applications.
coder543
Nope... this stuff is 96.5% copper, and copper is ~3x as expensive as stainless steel. Even if tantalum and lithium were free, it would be substantially more expensive. Tantalum is not free, though. It's a very expensive material at about 100x the cost per kg relative to stainless steel, so it nearly doubles the cost of the raw material inputs by itself with its 3% contribution. The process of making this alloy is also likely to be expensive.
I'm also not sure how much being in an alloy would impact the antimicrobial effects of copper.
kragen
You're right about the cost angle, though it might be cheaper than stellite, inconel, monel, that kind of thing.
Generally copper does retain its antibacterial properties in alloys where it's a high proportion of the alloy, like this one.
londons_explore
This material won't ever be cheap - all 3 ingredients cost a lot more than stainless steel.
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pfdietz
This could be useful in heat exchangers and rocket engine thrust chambers. I imagine this has very high thermal conductivity compared to steels. The thermal conductivity of copper is about 20x that of stainless steel. So, you can make the walls of the passages an order of magnitude thicker, increasing their strength proportionally.
kragen
Rearden metal heat exchangers, eh?
fnord77
will it make a good bicycle frame?
Beretta_Vexee
For a bicycle frame, we want an alloy that is relatively light and easy to weld. At no point is weldability considered, and it is not impossible that this alloy welds very poorly (losing its properties in the area thermally affected by welding, requires a very narrow energy range to weld properly).
The advantages of this alloy do not make it a better choice than special steels or titanium alloys when it comes to metallic materials.
There are few cyclists on Venus.
eCa
They mention both high temperature durability and conductivity as positives. Not really the most important qualities in a bike frame to be fair.
I doubt it beats aluminium in cost, so it would need to significantly beat carbon in performance to make it worthwhile.
Maken
If you don't mind it being heavier than a steel frame.
fc417fc802
Well it's on par with stainless steel strength wise while being both more expensive and heaver. Presumably also much more prone to corrosion.
xyst
It would be a very expensive bicycle frame. That is for 100% certain ;)
xyst
Besides space and ~~efficient killing/murdering~~ military industries, where would this “superalloy-like” strength be useful in?
Nuclear plants?
Maybe useful in supercomputing/quantum computing?
fpoling
Efficient and less polluting coal plants. To approach 50% or more efficiency when converting the thermal energy of coal to electricity the temperature must exceed 700C, but that brings all kind of problems as it presently requires exotic alloys.
topspin
It's difficult to predict. High performance heat exchangers are an obvious application, but the potential is great for many other things.
"Nuclear plants?"
Sure. One of the most challenging problems in a PWRs is heat exchange; the so called "steam generators" that circulate primary and secondary water, for instance. They're huge, expensive heat exchangers and their primary failure mode is cracking. A durable, high temperature, high thermal conductivity copper based alloy goes directly to this. Better thermal conductivity could make these devices substantially smaller, reducing costs in all sorts of way, or enable novel designs.
Beretta_Vexee
Pressurised water reactors use Inconel tubes. Inconel 600 alloys are high-chromium nickel alloys for steam exchange tubes that are highly resistant to various forms of corrosion (capable of withstanding to 30 years in water with boric acid and 300°C+).
The design of these alloys and exchangers is extremely complex and benefits from several thousand years of operational experience. This applies to the alloys themselves, their heat treatment, shaping, interaction with other materials, ageing, etc.
It is highly unlikely that these alloys will be abandoned in the next 20-30 years.
lutusp
Legitimate content aside, this article is a perfect example of modern public relations writing, of flash over substance. Each paragraph is larded with PR buzzwords like "breakthrough," "cutting-edge," "groundbreaking," etc. to the degree that the topic is nearly lost in the lexical shrubbery.
And it's clear the article's author doesn't understand scientific writing. Each participant is identified as having a PhD (when true), contrary to accepted academic practice. Imagine a scientific article by Albert Einstein, tagged with "PhD" -- except that in 1905, any relevance aside, Einstein didn't have one. My point is that the participants' academic degrees are irrelevant to the science. As Richard Feynman said, "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion". Oh -- wait -- did I mention that Feynman had a PhD?
My favorite phrase from an article that tries to raise empty PR prose to an art form: "... Lehigh is the only university in the Lehigh Valley to have this designation ..." Noted. But this is like saying, "We're tops in our ZIP code!"
syllogistic
good take overall, though the last point is forgiven as a subtle dig at lafayette
mjevans
Backup link https://web.archive.org/web/20250415035227/https://news.lehi...
"""
Unlike typical grain boundaries that migrate over time at high temperatures, this complexion acts as a structural stabilizer, maintaining the nanocrystalline structure, preventing grain growth and dramatically improving high-temperature performance.
The alloy holds its shape under extreme, long-term thermal exposure and mechanical stress, resisting deformation even near its melting point, noted Patrick Cantwell, a research scientist at Lehigh University and co-author of the study.
"""
This sounds exotic, but possibly better performing in some use cases?
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WrongOnInternet
I'm tired of articles with titles like "X makes Y bigger/faster/stronger," then never giving an answer to the obvious question: "How much?" This article is happy to tell you it costs $25M to develop , how many hours the annealed the metal, the patent numbers, the years the researchers got their degrees, but never once gives a single number related to the materials performance. Maybe its 0.1% better, maybe its 1000% better. I guess its not important.
shakna
There's a few numbers in the Science article, and they do actually link to it, unlike some. [0
And the intro numbers are... Exciting.
> This core-shell structure neither dissolves nor coarsens at temperatures of up to 800°C while also causing the yielding strength to be in excess of 1 gigapascal.
nine_k
In other words, it makes the copper allow much stronger than mild steels, like the stainless steels, and on par with strong (but by far not the strongest) steel alloys.
Imagine cutting stainless steel with a copper-based blade, and not the other way around.
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dcl
Rearden metal...?
sanex
Not as strong as steel, real or imaginary.
AngryData
Well not as strong as the best steels, but still stronger than many common steels. Even some less special bronze alloys can beat common steels in strength.
nine_k
Milder steels have yield strength in the 200-300 MPa range, while this alloy reaches nearly 1000 MPa.
Okay, this is cool.
It's a copper-tantalum-lithium alloy: 96.5% Cu, 3% Ta, 0.5% Li.
Tantalum isn't soluble in copper and doesn't form any intermetallic compounds, so under normal circumstances you'd get something like a metal matrix composite -- pure tantalum particles dispersed in a copper matrix. Add lithium, though, and the intermetallic Cu3Li forms, and tantalum is apparently very attracted to this stuff, so you end up with Cu3Li particles with Ta shells in that copper matrix.
Yield Strength = ~1000MPa, so it's genuinely on par with high-temp nickel superalloys, though somewhat weaker than the cobalt-base ones, and far weaker than the best steels.
Interestingly, it's actually a little bit weaker than the copper-beryllium alloy C17200. (YS: ~1200-1300 MPa.) But CuBe is very expensive, not very ductile, and potentially hazardous. Tantalum, though expensive, is still 10x cheaper than beryllium.
Depending on its thermal and electrical properties, and on its ease of manufacture, this could be a very versatile material, and may replace nickel/cobalt alloys in certain applications.