12/03/2025
High-Temperature-Resistant Material Perfect for Applications Like Energy-Efficient Aircraft Engines
A new material might contribute to a reduction of the fossil fuels consumed by aircraft engines and gas turbines in the future. A research team from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed a refractory metal-based alloy with properties unparalleled to date. The novel combination of chromium, molybdenum, and silicon is ductile at ambient temperature. With its melting temperature of about 2,000 °C, it remains stable even at high temperatures and is at the same time oxidation resistant. The results are published in the journal Nature.
High-temperature-resistant metallic materials are required for aircraft engines, gas turbines, X-ray units, and many other technical applications. Refractory metals such as tungsten, molybdenum, and chromium, whose melting points are around or higher than 2,000 °C, can be most resistant to high temperatures. Their practical application, however, has limitations: They are brittle at room temperature and, in contact with oxygen, they start to oxidize causing failure within a short time at temperatures of 600 to 700 °C. Therefore, they can only be used under technically complex vacuum conditions — for example as X-ray rotating anodes.
Due to these challenges, superalloys based on nickel have been used for decades in components that are exposed to air or combustion gases at high temperatures. They are used, for example, as standard materials for gas turbines. “The existing superalloys are made of many different metallic elements including rarely available ones so that they combine several properties. They are ductile at room temperature, stable at high temperatures, and resistant to oxidation,” explained Professor Martin Heilmaier, KIT Institute for Applied Materials — Materials Science and Engineering. “However — and there is the rub — the operating temperatures, i.e. the temperatures at which they can be used safely, are in the range of up to 1,100 °C maximum. This is too low to exploit the full potential for more efficiency in turbines or other high-temperature applications. The fact is that the efficiency in combustion processes increases with temperature.”
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