Schuh ultra-fine-grain nickel-tungsten alloy commercialization

Tom characterizes his MIT colleague Christopher Schuh's tenure work and commercial venture (nickel-tungsten alloy with stabilized ultra-fine grain due to poor mutual solubility and tungsten's low diffusivity). Used as the modern follow-on to Backofen's unsolved grain-stabilization problem from §8.p1-3.

So Backofen in the late 60s is sitting there thinking, how can I get fine grain size? Since then, people have realized that the 30% one-phase-in-another helps stabilize the grain size. You get people like Professor Schuh, who made part of his tenure basically working with ultra-fine-grain metals. His company is based on a nickel-tungsten alloy, where the tungsten — it gets into not only volume fraction but solubility and diffusivity. Nickel and tungsten have lousy solubility in each other, and tungsten has lousy diffusivity because of its high melting point. So Professor Schuh has been able to stabilize very fine grains. It took 30 years between Backofen and Professor Schuh for people to get to ultra-fine-grain materials. Some of those alloys should have excellent forming characteristics in certain temperature ranges. But you have to do your mechanical shearing before the grains get so big that they lose their elongation capability.