At the end of February, reporters from Hubei Daily visited the National Key Laboratory of High-Temperature Light Alloys and Application Technology at Wuhan University of Technology to uncover how Professor Hua Lin's team overcame the challenge of coordinating plastic forming and heat treatment of aluminum alloys, achieving international-leading strength and toughness in aluminum alloy components—a breakthrough hailed as "super-strong bones."
In December 2024, China's Long March 12 carrier rocket lifted off from Wenchang, Hainan. This behemoth, hailed as "China's most powerful single-core rocket for low-Earth orbit," has increased the low-Earth orbit payload capacity of China's single-core rockets to over 10 tons. The core "skeleton"—aluminum alloy panels and reinforcement frames—shines with the brilliance of Professor Hua Lin's team at Wuhan University of Technology.
In high-end manufacturing fields such as automobiles, aircraft, rockets, and aircraft carriers, aluminum alloy materials are highly valued for their lightweight, corrosion-resistant, and high-strength properties. However, traditional aluminum alloy manufacturing processes require repeated forging and heat treatment, during which aluminum alloys behave like a "stubborn child": either the precision is low, leading to significant assembly errors, or the strength and toughness are insufficient, reducing the rocket's payload capacity, or the manufacturing cycle is long and inefficient, failing to meet the demands of commercial aerospace mass production.
Facing these challenges, Professor Hua Lin, after more than a decade of dedicated research, led his team to develop the world's first high-efficiency, high-precision forming technology for high-strength aluminum alloys, successfully solving the coordination problem between plastic forming and heat treatment, and taming aluminum alloys.
On February 28, in Professor Hua Lin's office, he explained that traditional processes require post-forming heat treatment to "strengthen" the material, similar to quenching during forging, but this often leads to cracking and deformation, resulting in poor precision. The team's technology pre-quenches and ages the material before forming, aligning its internal crystal structure in advance to achieve high strength and plasticity—like injecting a "deformation strengthening gene" into the metal, making it "pre-hardened." During mold forming, deformation strengthening and phase transformation strengthening are combined to achieve high strength. After mold forming, the quenching heat treatment and manual shaping processes are eliminated, achieving high precision and efficiency. This technology not only meets the "zero-tolerance" assembly precision requirements of rockets but also ensures that components maintain ultra-high strength, capable of withstanding the extreme conditions of rocket service.
Professor Hua Lin metaphorically described the technology: "It's like giving the metal a 'special training'—making it strong enough to withstand impacts while ensuring it grows exactly according to the design blueprint."
Experts from the Eighth Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation stated: "The application of high-efficiency, high-precision forming technology for high-strength aluminum alloys not only solved the challenges of the Long March 12 rocket but also marks China's international competitiveness in the field of high-strength, lightweight structural manufacturing."
Professor Hua Lin's team collaborated deeply with the Shanghai Aerospace Equipment Manufacturing Factory to develop high-strength, high-precision rocket panels, reinforcement frames, and other large, complex thin-walled aluminum alloy components. All performance indicators exceeded design requirements, achieving high-quality, efficient forming and manufacturing of the rocket's main load-bearing aluminum alloy components, ensuring the smooth progress and successful maiden flight of the Long March 12 rocket. At the same time, the production efficiency of related components increased by more than 10 times, and the cost per unit decreased by 40%, laying the foundation for the mass production of commercial aerospace.
Reporters learned that this technology has already been applied to the new generation of Dongfeng "Warrior" military vehicles and will be used in civilian automotive manufacturing and other fields.
Professor Hua Lin explained that in vehicle traffic accidents, side collisions account for the highest proportion, and the main safety component in side collisions is the door anti-collision beam. After applying the high-efficiency, high-precision forming technology for high-strength aluminum alloys, the tensile strength of the door anti-collision beam now exceeds 600 MPa, twice that of ordinary aluminum alloys, with an elongation rate of 13%. The strength and toughness have reached the highest international level, making cars "exceptionally crash-resistant."
