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Corporations creating next-generation products and revolutionary technologies often find themselves restricted by the physical limitations of conventional materials. In sectors like aerospace, defense, energy, and industrial manufacturing, stretching those limits can introduce potential failure points within the system, yet firms lack superior alternatives, since generating new materials at scale demands lengthy timelines and substantial costs.
Foundation Alloy seeks to redefine the standard. Founded by a team from MIT, the company can fabricate a new category of ultra-high-performance metal alloys utilizing an innovative production method that does not depend on melting raw substances. The company’s solid-state metallurgy technology, which streamlines the development and production of next-gen alloys, originated from years of research by former MIT professor Chris Schuh and his colleagues.
“This represents a completely novel method for creating metals,” states CEO Jake Guglin MBA ’19, who co-established Foundation Alloy alongside Schuh, Jasper Lienhard ’15, PhD ’22, and Tim Rupert PhD ’11. “It provides us with a comprehensive set of principles in materials engineering, enabling us to design a variety of compositions with previously impossible properties. We leverage that to create products that perform better in advanced industrial settings.”
Foundation Alloy claims its metal alloys can achieve double the strength of conventional metals, with tenfold faster product development, permitting firms to test, refine, and integrate new metals into products in months rather than years.
The company is already engineering metals and delivering demonstration components to businesses producing items such as airplanes, bicycles, and automobiles. It is also developing test components for partners in industries characterized by longer development cycles, including defense and aerospace.
Looking ahead, the company is confident that its methodology allows businesses to construct higher-performing, more dependable systems, ranging from rockets to vehicles, nuclear fusion reactors, and artificial intelligence chips.
“For complex systems like rocket and jet engines, if you can operate them at higher temperatures, you can achieve a more efficient fuel utilization and a more powerful system,” Guglin explains. “The key limitation is whether structural integrity can be maintained at those elevated temperatures, which fundamentally is a materials issue. Presently, we are also focusing heavily on advanced manufacturing and tooling, which may seem unexciting but serves as the crucial backbone of the industrial sector; boosting properties without substantially increasing costs can unveil efficiencies in operations, performance, and capacity, all of which can only be achieved with different materials.”
From MIT to the globe
Schuh joined MIT’s faculty in 2002 to investigate the processing, structure, and properties of metals and other materials. He was appointed head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in 2011 before transitioning to dean of engineering at Northwestern University in 2023, after over 20 years at MIT.
“Chris aimed to examine metals from diverse viewpoints and develop methods that are more economically efficient and performance-oriented than what traditional processes allow,” Guglin notes. “It wasn’t solely for academic publications — it was about creating innovative methods that would benefit the industrial realm.”
Rupert and Lienhard conducted their doctoral research in Schuh’s lab, and Rupert developed complementary technologies to the solid-state methods created by Schuh and his associates while serving as a professor at the University of California at Irvine.
Guglin arrived at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2017, eager to engage with transformative technologies.
“I sought out a place where I could discover fundamental technological breakthroughs that provide disproportionate value — the kinds of achievements that, without occurring here, would not happen elsewhere,” Guglin reflects.
In one of his classes, a PhD student from Schuh’s lab rehearsed his thesis defense by explaining his research on a novel way to produce metal alloys.
“I didn’t grasp any of it — I have a background in philosophy,” Guglin admits. “But when I heard ‘stronger metals,’ I recognized the potential of this extraordinary platform that Chris’ lab was developing, and it resonated with exactly why I wanted to come to MIT.”
Guglin reached out to Schuh, and the duo maintained contact over the following years as Guglin graduated and began working for aerospace companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, where he encountered the challenges posed by the metal parts supply chain.
In 2022, the two finally chose to establish a company, adding Rupert and Lienhard and licensing technology from MIT and UC Irvine.
The founders’ initial challenge was scaling the technology.
“There’s a significant amount of process engineering involved in transitioning from executing something once at 5 grams to replicating it 100 times a week at 100 kilograms per batch,” Guglin explains.
Currently, Foundation Alloy begins with its customers’ material specifications and determines an exact mixture of the powdered raw materials that every metal originates from. Subsequently, it employs a specialized industrial mixer — which Guglin likens to an industrial KitchenAid blender — to produce a metal powder that is uniform at the atomic level.
“In our process, from raw material through to the final part, we never melt the metal,” Guglin asserts. “That is unusual, if not unheard of, in conventional metal manufacturing.”
The materials can then be solidified using traditional techniques such as metal injection molding, pressing, or 3D printing. The concluding step is sintering in a furnace.
“We also engage extensively in studying how the metal interacts within the sintering furnace,” Guglin adds. “Our materials are specifically engineered to sinter at relatively low temperatures, swiftly, and achieve full density.”
The advanced sintering process utilizes an order of magnitude less heat, thereby cutting costs while enabling the company to bypass secondary processes for quality assurance. This approach also grants Foundation Alloy greater control over the microstructure of the completed components.
“That’s the source of a significant portion of our performance enhancement,” Guglin states. “And by eliminating those secondary processing stages, we save days, if not weeks, in addition to reducing costs and energy consumption.”
A foundation for industry
Foundation Alloy is presently piloting its metals throughout the industrial sector and has also secured grants to develop components for critical elements of nuclear fusion reactors.
“The name Foundation Alloy reflects our ambition to serve as the cornerstone for the next generation of industry,” Guglin explains.
Unlike traditional metal manufacturing, where new alloys require substantial investments to scale, Guglin claims the firm’s process for developing new alloys is virtually identical to its production procedures, enabling much quicker scaling of new materials manufacturing.
“At the heart of our approach is viewing challenges through the lens of material scientists equipped with new technology,” Guglin asserts. “We are not constrained by the notion that this kind of steel must resolve this specific issue. We strive to understand the reasons for that steel’s failure and then leverage our technology to solve the problem in a manner that generates not just a 10 percent enhancement, but rather two- or five-fold advancements in performance.”
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