Abstract
Developing additive manufacturing (AM) aluminum alloys with high temperature strength remains a formidable scientific challenge, primarily due to the strengthening precipitates coarsening above 200°C. Conventional heat-resistant alloy design strategies aim to hinder the precipitate coarsening by incorporating low diffusive alloying elements. However, such approaches remain ineffective against thermally driven defect mobilization, especially for vacancy diffusion and dislocation climbing, which are dominant drivers of high temperature weakening. As a result, most AM Al alloys exhibit a rapid decline in strength within this critical temperature range. Through reverse-engineering of intrinsic atom-defect/atom attraction, we employ an intrinsic attraction (IA) strategy to trigger multi-dimensional defect confinement mechanisms. This approach achieves: divacancy clusters anchoring free vacancies; solute atmospheres capturing mobile dislocations and suppressing creep deformation; specific segregation forming nanostructures at precipitate interfaces and interiors to inhibit coarsening. The AM heat-resistant Al alloy demonstrates satisfactory high temperature performance, exhibiting yield strengths of ~305 MPa at 300°C, ~190 MPa at 400°C, coupled with creep resistance at 200-400°C (\(\dot{\varepsilon }\) < 10-7/s) and prominent processability for large-size bladed disk. This strategy transcends the conventional empirical paradigm by engineering elemental segregation tendencies at specific sites, provides a universal design approach for the development of aluminum alloys or other high temperature structural materials.
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Relevant data supporting the key findings of this study are available within the article and the Supplementary Information file. The source data generated in this study have been deposited in the Figshare repository under the accession code Doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.31403481.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Fundamental and Interdisciplinary Disciplines Breakthrough Plan of the Ministry of Education of China (JYB2025XDXM409, R. L.); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers U21B2073, R.L.; 52571056, K.G.); Guizhou Provincial Science and Technology Projects (No. [2025]044, R.L.).
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R.L. proposed and supervised the project. Y.W. performed most of the properties and the characterizations. C.Y. performed the DFT calculations. Y.W., C.Y., K.G., T.Y. and R.L. analyzed the data. Y.W., C.Y., K.G., T.Y. and R.L. contributed to the result discussion. Y.W. and C.Y. prepared samples. Y.W., K.G. and R.L. conceptualized the manuscript. The final version was approved by all authors before submission.
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Wang, Y., Yu, C., Gan, K. et al. Intrinsic attraction driving the high temperature performance of additively manufactured aluminum alloys. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71390-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71390-3
