Advancing Materials Science with Partnerships

The field of materials science is evolving quickly. Computing power, atomic-scale microscopy, artificial intelligence, and other advancements are allowing scientists to study metals at an atomic level, and to see how they behave in real time. By building upon a long tradition of pursuing research in partnership with universities and public organizations, Constellium is taking full advantage of this exciting era.   

Currently, Constellium maintains around 50 scientific partnerships with leading establishments in the US, the UK, and Europe. Our biggest ongoing partnership is at UTC Brunel, in England, where around 50 Constellium employees from our AS&I business unit are working on a permanent basis, exploring a range of topics, from strengthening mechanisms to recycling.

C-TEC's Scientific Director, Timothy Warner, says these partnerships are two-way streets, with contributions from both sides. "Constellium brings an understanding of industrial challenges and the ability to translate those industrial challenges into fundamental scientific questions we need to answer; our partners bring top-notch expertise in complementary competency domains and equipment that we couldn’t otherwise access.”  For example, France's SIMaP is equipped with a new 3D atom probe that can reveal the atomic structure of our Airware® products.

At times, the partnerships involve an exchange of talents. A C-TEC engineer recently spent several months onsite at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while the renowned American university has committed two post-grads to conduct research on two topics in alloy design. One is how to design a high-performance alloy containing a significant degree of end-of-life scrap. The other is looking at the atomic structure of the interfaces between aluminum crystals, known as "grain boundaries," so that we can improve their resistance, and hence the toughness of aerospace products.

In Germany, we have an ongoing relationship with the Max Planck Institute in Düsseldorf, which has developed an excellent software tool called DAMASK that shows how the grain orientations of metals affect their deformation. We are working together to model the impact of grain orientation on damage during bending of aluminum alloys, important for automotive and packaging applications.

In 2022, we formalized our decades-long relationship with SIMaP (Grenoble INP, CNRS, and UGA) by launching a common lab called 3Alp, which now has three PhD projects underway. Two are studying additive manufacturing and how to optimize the performance of powder alloys in 3D-printed parts. The third project is using machine learning and AI to explore how increased levels of impurities (iron, manganese) affect formability, crashworthiness, and other characteristics of 6000 series alloys, which are used for automotive body sheet. The ultimate goal is to make alloys that deliver the same properties, but with higher recycled input.

Recycling is a key research topic in metallurgy today, as recycled aluminum, for example, requires 20 times less energy than the primary aluminum produced by smelting. Only a decade ago, our scientists were focused mostly on ways to optimize alloys for better performance. But as society has changed, and the world requires us to recover and remelt materials after the useful lives of the objects containing them, C-TEC is looking to combine performance with the variability of recycled content. "This brings meaning to research," Warner says. "It's motivating for students and young people to realize that a lot of industrial research is trying to reduce our carbon footprint." The importance of this work underlies Constellium's partnerships, giving us access to some the best and brightest minds around the world.