Low-cost manufacturing process for nanostructured metals and alloys

In spite of their interesting properties, nanostructured materials have found limited uses because of the cost of preparation and the limited range of materials that can be synthesized. It has been shown that most of these limitations can be overcome by subjecting a material to large-scale deformation, as occurs during common machining operations. The chips produced during lathe machining of a variety of pure metals, steels, and other alloys are shown to be nanostructured with grain (crystal) sizes between 100 and 800 nm. The hardness of the chips is found to be significantly greater than that of the bulk material.