Phase Stability and Microstructural Evolution in Aluminum Alloys

Dear Colleagues,

The future outlook for aluminum and aluminum alloys is highly promising due to their expanding applications in the automotive, aerospace, and construction industries, amongst others. Their low density and excellent specific properties make aluminum alloys crucial for reducing energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, especially in transportation.

Continued progress in aluminum technologies relies on both improving existing alloys and developing new compositions. Alongside traditional processing routes, additive manufacturing provides additional opportunities to tailor microstructures and achieve unique property combinations. Equally important, modern computational methods—such as first-principles calculations, phonon calculations, and CALPHAD-based thermodynamic modeling—have become indispensable tools for predicting atomic configurations, assessing phase stability, and guiding alloy design. By linking atomic-scale calculations with microstructural evolution, these approaches play a critical role in understanding and optimizing the performance of aluminum alloys across multiple length scales.

This Special Issue of Metals highlights the relationships between chemical composition and precipitation evolution in aluminum alloys, featuring the scientific and technological state of the art of aluminum alloys in 2026 (see the Keywords/Topics below). Contributions to this 2026 account are highly valuable and appreciated. We invite you to contribute research work that studies the effect of composition and heat treatment on precipitate evolution and properties of aluminum alloys and relates alloy structure to different properties.

Dr. Wei Shao
Guest Editor

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