The alloy is nanocrystalline, refractory and has high entropy. As a result, it could find applications in the nuclear power or space industries, among others. Such an alloy is being developed by an international team of scientists, including Dr Jan Wróbel of the Faculty of Materials Engineering at Warsaw University of Technology (“PW”).

A publication on the W-Ta-Cr-V-Hf alloy was published in the journal Nature Communications. In addition to the PW researcher, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and universities worked on the publication: Wisconsin-Madison, Clemson, Oxford, Middle East Technical University in Ankara. 

‘It is refractory and (like the W-Ta-Cr-V we studied earlier) eminently resistant to radiation’, explains Dr Eng. Jan Wróbel. ‘Compared to its predecessor, however, it is characterised by markedly better microstructural stability, resulting from the high density of stable grain boundaries, chemical complexity and the lowering of the temperature at which brittle intermetallic phases appear in the alloy’, adds the scientist.