US-based alloy steel materials producer QuesTek Innovations LLC has won the US Small Business Administration (SBA) 2016 Tibbetts Award. This award is presented to small businesses, organizations and individuals that have demonstrated excellence in using Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding to develop technological innovation, technology transfer, business impact and product commercialization.
The 2016 Tibbetts Award was presented to 37 small businesses, and QuesTek was recognized for its unique contributions to the field of integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) and President Obama’s Materials Genome Initiative.
QuesTek received its first SBIR-funded project in 2001, and has since been awarded over U$30 million across a total of 93 projects, all of which have focused on the modeling and design of new materials. With the funding, QuesTek designed and commercialized two steels and has also designed new materials across a range of industries and alloy systems, for example, aluminum alloys for additive manufacturing processes that address the hot cracking issues observed in Al legacy alloys. The company has also designed three titanium alloys suited for additive manufacturing that reportedly offer greater strength and toughness versus traditional Ti-6Al-4V.
This story is reprinted from material from QuesTek, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
