Demystifying how to use machine learning in alloy design: A case study of Intellegens' work with Rolls-Royce

March 14, 2022 | Case Study

Rolls-Royce worked with materials informatics startup Intellegens to design a nickel-based superalloy using machine learning (ML). Nickel-based superalloys are used to build engines in the aerospace industry. Due to the harsh operating conditions of a working engine, these alloys need to have many extreme properties at the same time, and that multivariable optimization problem has often significantly slowed down progress as the common method for alloy design is frequently based on trial and error and its combination of certain physics-based simulations. While promising methods like integrated computational materials engineering offer good results in alloy design, they can't enable us to exhaustively explore the design space — thus giving us only "local minima" of alloy recipes.