The high yield strength and tensile plasticity of metallic materials are crucial for their engineering applications. However, for all the alloys developed thus far, including recent high-entropy alloys, those possessing good tensile ductility rarely approach 2 GPa yield strength at room temperature. The few that do are mostly ultrastrong steels; however, their stress-strain curves exhibit plateaus and serrations, as their tensile flow actually suffers from plastic instability (such as Lüders strains), and the elongation is pseudo-uniform at best. Moreover, even when such instabilities are minimized, as in certain maraging steels, their uniform elongation (εu) remains disappointingly low (~3.8%). A promising strategy to overcome these limitations involves leveraging the compositional complexity of high/medium-entropy alloys (H/MEAs). However, despite the use of nanoprecipitation and microstructural refinement, most H/MEAs still fail to surpass a σy of 1.2 GPa due to inadequate precipitate volume fractions or reliance on complex and impractical processing techniques like cryo-rolling. Thus, despite considerable progress, a truly uniform and simultaneously high-strength (~2 GPa) H/MEA remains elusive, highlighting a critical gap in the development of next-generation structural materials.
To address these challenges, a team under the guidance of Pro. Sun Jun at the National Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, proposed a new approach to designing ultra-strong-yet-ductile alloys. Dr. Yasir Sohail, under the supervision of Prof. Jinyu Zhang, along with Pro. Dezhen Xue, applied domain-specific knowledge to narrow the design space and enhance the performance of a machine learning (ML) model. As a result, a multi-principal-element alloy (MPEA) with the composition Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 was identified. Subsequent post-casting processing, involving various rolling and heat treatment parameters, successfully achieved the targeted mechanical properties. The resulting yield strength–uniform ductility combinations ranged from (1.5 GPa, 31%) to (1.95 GPa, 15%), reaching a performance domain previously inaccessible to bulk alloys. The microstructure contains a high volume fraction of coherent L12 (67 vol.%) and incoherent deformable B2 (15 vol.%) embedded in an FCC matrix. The latter, being multi-component with a reduced chemical ordering energy, is a deformable phase that accumulates dislocations inside to help sustain a high strain hardening rate that prolongs uniform elongation.
Figure 1. (a) Domain knowledge-based machine learning model (active learning loop consisting of six steps) predicting FeNiCoAlTa complex alloy with superb plasticity, (b) theoretical prediction of yield strength matching with experimental measurement of yield strength confirming the reliability of the machine learning model, and (c) experimental measurement of yield strength versus the number of iterations of the model, which reveals the optimal composition of the Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 complex alloy.
Figure 2. (a-d) Room temperature deformation and interfacial characteristics of Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 complex alloy with three-phase organization, i.e., dislocations are able to cut through the L12 nanoparticle and are stored in the low-modulus B2 micrometer phase, and dislocations are present at both the L12/FCC coherent interphase and the B2/FCC non-coherent interfaces; (e) Atom probe analysis of the chemical composition and distribution characteristics of the complex alloy, and the elemental composition of the multicomponent L12 nanoparticle and B2 micrometer phase.
Figure 3. Evolution of dislocation densities of the constituent phases in the Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 complex alloy with strain (a1-d1) ε=0, (a2-d2) ε=8%, and (a3-d3) ε=20%, indicating that the low-modulus B2 microparticle phase is capable of storing higher densities of dislocations than the (FCC+L12) matrix.
Figure 4. (a-b) Engineering stress-strain and true stress-strain curves of complex alloys with different compositions, (c) work-hardening properties of Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 complex alloy in comparison with other 2GPa-class ultra-high-strength metallic materials (D&P steels, martensitic steels, and medium- and high-entropy alloys), (d, e) Fe35Ni29Co21Al12Ta3 complex The yield strength-uniform tensile elongation comparisons and yield strength-product of tensile strength with elongation comparisons of the alloys significantly outperform the combination of room-temperature mechanical properties of other metallic materials reported so far when compared with other metallic materials.
The research results are published online in Nature under the title “Machine-learning design of ductile FeNiCoAlTa alloys with high strength”. This work is not only the first Nature article independently produced by the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University, but also the first Nature article published by a foreign student as the first author.
First author: Dr. Yasir Sohail, Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Corresponding authors: Prof. Zhang Jinyu, Prof. Ma En, and Academician Sun Jun.
Other contributors:Dr. Zhang Chongle, Dr. Hang Zhang, Assoc. Prof. Yang Yang, Prof. Xue Dezhen, Prof. Liu Gang and others.
Corresponding institution: National Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 111 Intellectual Resources Base, Shaanxi Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Team Program, and the Basic Research fund of Central Universities. The characterization and testing work was supported by the Analytical Testing Sharing Center of Xi'an Jiaotong University, the Experimental Technology Center of the School of Materials and the Shanghai Light Source.
Paper Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09160-2
