A rapid and effective method for alloy materials design via sample data transfer machine learning

One of the challenges in material design is to rapidly develop new materials or improve the performance of materials by utilizing the data and knowledge of existing materials. Here, a rapid and effective method of alloy material design via data transfer learning is proposed to efficiently design new alloys using existing data. A new type of aluminum alloy (E2 alloy) with ultra strength and high toughness previously developed by the authors is used as an example. An optimal three-stage solution-aging treatment process (T66R) was efficiently designed transferring 1053 pieces of process-property relationship data of existing AA7xxx commercial aluminum alloys. It realizes the substantial improvement of strength and plasticity of E2 alloy simultaneously, which is of great significance for lightweight of high-end equipment. Meanwhile, the microstructure analysis clarifies the mechanism of alloy performance improvement. This study shows that transferring the existing alloy data is an effective method to design new alloys.