Home » High Strength

High Strength

When Failure is Not an Option.

In structural engineering, "strength" is often a trade-off. You can have high hardness, but you lose ductility. You can have light weight, but you lose stiffness.

LAYRR Materials supplies the advanced powders that break these compromises. We focus on the "Structural Triangle": Tensile Strength, Fracture Toughness, and Fatigue Resistance. Whether you are printing a landing gear knuckle that must survive a hard landing or a suspension upright for a rally car, we provide the feedstock that turns topological optimisation into structural reality.

1. Ultra-High Strength Steels (UHSS)

The Brute Force Standard.

When you need absolute load-bearing capacity in a compact volume, nothing beats steel. But printing steel requires mastering the cooling rates to prevent quench cracking.

  • Maraging Steel M300 (18Ni-300):
    • The Benchmark: Yield Strength > 2000 MPa after aging.
    • The Advantage: Unlike carbon steels, M300 hardens via inter-metallic precipitation (Ni3Ti), resulting in almost zero dimensional distortion during heat treatment. Perfect for tooling and high-stress drive shafts.

  • Low Alloy Steel 4340:

    • The Fatigue King: Known for deep harden ability and exceptional fatigue life.

    • The Application: Aircraft landing gear components and heavy-duty crankshafts where cyclic loading is the primary failure mode.

2. High-Strength Aluminium

Lightweight Stiffness.

Standard AlSi10Mg is great for brackets, but it lacks the specific strength for airframe structures. We supply the next generation of "Scalable" aluminium alloys.

  • High-Strength Al-Mg-Sc (Scalmalloy® Equivalent):

    • The Science: The addition of Scandium (Sc) creates coherent Al3Sc precipitates that lock grain boundaries, preventing grain growth during printing.

    • The Result: Tensile strengths rivaling Titanium (~500 MPa) but with the density of Aluminium.

    • The Application: Formula 1 chassis nodes, satellite bulkheads, and heat exchangers that double as structural members.

3. Titanium Structural Alloys

The Specific Strength Champion.

Titanium offers the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metallic element. It is the default choice for aerospace structures that must be light yet bulletproof.

  • Ti-6Al-4V Grade 23 (ELI):

    • Damage Tolerance: The "Extra Low Interstitial" (ELI) grade reduces Oxygen and Iron content to maximise fracture toughness, ensuring that if a crack forms, it grows slowly rather than shattering the part.

    • Application: Ballistic armour, aircraft pylons, and centrifuges.

Engineering Focus: Fatigue Life

In high-strength AM, static strength is easy; fatigue life is hard. The killer of structural prints is Surface Roughness and Porosity.

  1. The "Surface Effect": As-printed surfaces have micro-notches that act as crack initiation sites.

    • LAYRR Recommendation: For any cyclically loaded part (suspension, rotating shafts), we recommend machining critical interfaces or using Isotropic Superfinishing (REM) to smooth the surface and improve fatigue life by up to 10x.

  2. Defect Sensitivity: In 2000 MPa steel, a 50-micron pore is a fatal flaw.

    • The LAYRR Standard: Our UHSS powders are vacuum-atomised to eliminate gas inclusions. We highly recommend Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) for all critical structural parts to close internal microporosity and homogenize the grain structure.

Structural Applications Matrix

Load Case Priority Recommended Material Typical Part
Cyclic / Vibration Fatigue Life AISI 4340 / Ti-64 Crankshafts, Helicopter Rotor Hubs
Static / Compressive Yield Strength Maraging M300 Hydraulic Cylinders, Injection Moulds
Stiffness-Driven Specific Stiffness Al-Mg-Sc Drone Frames, Robot Arms
Impact / Ballistic Fracture Toughness Ti-6Al-4V Gr 23 Body Armour, Blast Shields
Wear & Load Surface Hardness Ferrium® C64 Transmission Gears, Actuators

Design Tip: Topology Optimisation

High-strength materials allow you to remove mass. Use "Generative Design" to place material only where the load path dictates. However, ensure you orient the build so that the primary stress vectors align with the X-Y plane (the strongest direction) rather than the Z-axis.