A new process for developing advanced metals at scale

Foundation Alloy, founded by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is producing a new class of ultra-high-performance metal alloys using a novel production process that doesn’t rely on melting raw materials. The company’s solid-state metallurgy technology was developed by former MIT professor Chris Schuh and collaborators.

“This is an entirely new approach to making metals,” says CEO Jake Guglin, who co-founded Foundation Alloy with Schuh, Jasper Lienhard, and Tim Rupert. “It gives us a broad set of rules on the materials engineering side that allows us to design a lot of different compositions with previously unattainable properties.”

The founders’ first challenge was scaling up the technology.

“There’s a lot of process engineering to go from doing something once at 5 grams to doing it 100 times a week at 100 kilograms per batch,” Guglin says.

Foundation Alloys starts with its customers’ material requirements and decides on a precise mixture of the powdered raw materials. From there, it uses a specialized industrial mixer to create a metal powder that’s homogenous down to the atomic level. Next, the material is solidified using traditional methods such as metal injection molding, pressing, or 3D printing. The final step is sintering in a furnace.

“Our materials are specifically designed to sinter at relatively low temperatures, relatively quickly, and all the way to full density,” Guglin says. The method also gives more control over the final parts’ microstructure.

The advanced sintering process uses an order of magnitude less heat, allowing the company to forego secondary processes for quality control. “And by not needing secondary processing steps, we’re saving days if not weeks in addition to the costs and energy savings,” Guglin says.

Foundation Alloy claims its metal alloys can be made 2x as strong as traditional metals, with 10x faster product development, allowing companies to test, iterate, and deploy new metals into products in months instead of years. The company is already designing metals and making test parts for partners in industries such as defense and aerospace.

“For advanced systems like rocket and jet engines, if you can run them hotter, you can get more efficient use of fuel and a more powerful system,” Guglin says. “The limiting factor is whether you have structural integrity at those higher temperatures, and that’s fundamentally a materials problem. Right now, we’re also doing a lot of work in advanced manufacturing and tooling, which is the unsexy but super-critical backbone of the industrial world, where being able to push properties up without multiplying costs can unlock efficiencies in operations, performance, and capacity, all in a way that’s only possible with different materials.”

Foundation Alloy
https://www.foundationalloy.com

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://web.mit.edu