Heat Treat Today publishes twelve print magazines a year and included in each is a letter from the editor. This letter is from the January 2026 Annual Technologies To Watch print edition. In today’s letter, Bethany Leone, managing editor at Heat Treat Today, shares her insights on the widening gap between material science and industrial engineering in heat treatment — and what leaders can do to make smarter material decisions.
I recently spoke with an industry educator who is also a metallurgist and an engineer. She stressed the need for heat treat leaders to make informed decisions, blending industrial engineering and materials science expertise — just one is only half of the conversation. Our current era is reckoning with the fruit of underprioritized materials science education.
This concern arose several times at industry trade shows last year, both in lectures and conversations with attendees. While academic institutions have been pivoting to close this materials gap, the difficulty remains: Are the components that we design and for which we curate heat treat processes around making use of the best materials?
Barriers to Material Matching
The question of performance is prevalent: Are we designing with the right material in mind? Additionally, this age of advanced manufacturing and additive manufacturing challenges what we know to be the best material for an application; a new superalloy on the market may offer unforeseen abilities as well as risks. There is also the practical concern of time and supply chain; the tariffs of 2025 have brought this concern close to home, no pun intended.
There are other practical concerns when it comes to materials, as I was informed by Malur Narayan. As the CEO of Xtrium, an AI-powered materials matching and intelligence platform that connects materials to real-world applications, he is attuned to the specific challenges around this question. According to Narayan, there are missed revenue opportunities by failure to consider materials that are common in industries outside of one’s own.
Moreover, even if the desire to innovate or examine new materials and processing methods is fostered, the typical months of discovery handicaps time and action steps. This makes sense because, as Narayan summarized, just because an alloy manufacturer developed an extremely useful alloy for applications in one industry doesn’t mean they are reaching clients in other industries. From that supply side, it takes market research to prove the use case in those alternative sectors.
Furthermore, there has not been an effective single-source of truth for users to navigate and compare properties against.
What Can You Do?
Talk with your materials supplier. A number of alloy suppliers can be accessed on HeatTreatBuyersGuide.com and searching www.heatreattoday.com for their published articles can yield helpful insights as to what other applications and treatments are within reach. Additionally, Xtrium is releasing an AI-native online search and discovery engine which is designed to match materials to real-world applications in minutes, cutting down the traditional months of manual research.
Look across industries for new applications. We will explore more about innovative materials applications and the benefit they have in alleviating the heat treat process in future editions of the magazine. If you have your own use case, please reach out to share your story.
Brace yourself. There are heat treat processing modifications that allow users to take advantage of less expensive alloys. We will be excited to share more on one of these innovative solutions in an upcoming magazine.
References
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). 2025. “Scientists Forge New ‘Superalloy’ That Could Revolutionize Jet Engines and Power Plants.” SciTechDaily. https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-forge-new-superalloy-that-could-revolutionize-jet-engines-and-power-plants/.
Managing Editor
Heat Treat Today
Contact: Bethany Leone at bethany@heattreattoday.com
