the inventors used a flow test they used a NUMBER_TOKEN ton high pressure die casting machine with a casting mold that contained a groove three millimeters thick and two meters long to test how far the alloy would flow before cooling to its solid state flowable alloys fill casting dyes more completely and quickly which minimizes defects and allows for intricate structures at this point the inventors add another requirement for the alloy which is that it must be usable as cast typically several steps are required after casting such as aging heat treatments quenching and coatings these extra steps upgrade the cast material so that it's strong and durable enough to be used in vehicle structures and so that it's non-reactive with chemicals like road salt let's pause here for a moment of appreciation as we said earlier an alloy with two process inputs such as temperature and carbon percentage or temperature and time is complex to master that's further compounded by the need to balance the output variables such as strength and ductility tesla is using an alloy with at least NUMBER_TOKEN elemental variables plus temperature and time then in terms of output variables they wanted an alloy with the following characteristics one a combination of strength and ductility that's better than other non-heat-treated cast aluminum alloys NUMBER_TOKEN. great flow ability to fill large and intricate molds with minimal defects NUMBER_TOKEN. usable as cast with no heat treatments required to upgrade the casting NUMBER_TOKEN. low reactivity with compounds such as road salt that might corrode other aluminum castings this is why i said in the first giga casting video that the material science going into the giga castings is spacex level stuff in fact after that video i found that the vice president of materials engineering at tesla charles kuman actually holds the same position at spacex furthermore i did a bit of digging on charles and i found that he's an expert on computational design and has a history of designing materials for aerospace applications that is the head of tesla's materials team does in fact have a history of working at the bleeding edge of materials design and aerospace applications making him perfect for spacex and tesla also gets to leverage that talent this is the general process he uses to develop a material yes there is a lot of computation involved but there are also trials to test the model a model is not reality so it needs to be calibrated through real-world testing you can't just punch requirements into a computer and have it spit out alien technology at least not yet developing new materials is more difficult than that and more exciting because you discover things that the model didn't predict let's get deeper into the patent figure one in the patent shows the landscape of cast aluminum materials that were available to tesla the higher the bend angle and strength the better the inventors didn't specify what was meant by the baseline i've marked with the orange dot i'm assuming it refers to an alloy that had most of the properties tesla needed but not all the baseline alloy has a strength of NUMBER_TOKEN megapascals and a NUMBER_TOKEN degree bend angle the green x is the minimum viable target that tesla had for their alloy had a strength of NUMBER_TOKEN megapascals and a bend angle of NUMBER_TOKEN degrees the pink dot indicating final composition is the aluminum alloy that the inventors highlighted for the patent application it has a strength of NUMBER_TOKEN megapascals and a NUMBER_TOKEN degree bend angle that is tesla's
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