Looping lasers whisk molten metals together during 3D printing, opening new alloy design route

Like modern-day alchemists, metallurgists are constantly discovering and perfecting recipes for better alloys. A crucial step in those recipes is to get different metals to mix evenly. Unveiling a new utensil for the metallurgical kitchen, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have invented a way to whisk metal with a laser as it’s 3D-printed, opening a new route for creating hard-to-make metal alloys. To verify their success, they also developed a way to watch changes in the metal using X-rays as they melted and solidified in a fraction of a second.