Foundation Alloy, a metal innovation enterprise, officially announced its MolyClast product line today, bringing the first batch of "printable and mass-produced" high-performance molybdenum alloys to the additive manufacturing industry. This move not only fills the gap in extreme environmental materials for 3D printing, but also heralds a wave of material replacement in scenarios such as rocket engines, the first wall of nuclear fusion, and semiconductor thermal management.

Traditional molybdenum processing is difficult, brittle, and expensive, which has always been loved and hated by designers, "Evan R., co-founder and CTO of Foundation Alloy, said at the press conference." MolyClast uses a unique integrated process of powder metallurgy and laser additive manufacturing to increase toughness by three times and reduce crack sensitivity by 70%, while retaining the high melting point, low expansion, and high thermal conductivity advantages of pure molybdenum. ”

Technical Highlights

The entire range of powders has been adapted to mainstream LPBF equipment such as EOS, SLM Solutions, and Velo3D, with a layer thickness that can be extended down to 20 µ m;

Printing density>99.3%, elongation after annealing ≥ 8%, can directly replace some Inconel 718 to reduce weight by more than 20%;

The synergistic effect of grain refinement and solid solution strengthening increases the tensile strength at 1200 ° C by 45%, which is twice that of current nickel based high-temperature alloys.

The first batch of brand names

MolyClast-1: Standard grade, balanced strength and toughness, used for nozzles and throat liners;

MolyClast-D: dispersion strengthened type, containing trace amounts of La ₂ O ∝, resistant to creep at 1500 ° C;

MolyClast HE: High thermal conductivity oriented grain, facing semiconductor heat dissipation components.

application implementation

SpaceX has tested printing MolyClast-D in the prototype of the new generation vacuum Merlin nozzle; Commonwealth Fusion Systems plans to use MolyClast HE for 1:1 size validation of the SPARC tokamak divertor. Foundation Alloy synchronously opens pre orders for 5kg and 15kg canned powders, with bulk delivery starting from Q4.

market outlook

The annual compound growth rate of the additive manufacturing market is 20%, and the high-temperature alloy sub segment is expected to exceed 4 billion US dollars by 2028. The launch of MolyClast may break the long-term monopoly of nickel based and cobalt based alloys, bringing a "double turning point" in material cost and performance to the three major industries of aerospace, energy, and electronics.

About Foundation Alloy

The company was founded in 2021, focusing on refractory metal additive processes and alloy design. It has received over $50 million in financing from institutions such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Airbus Ventures.