On January 9th, at CES 2024 held in Las Vegas, Lenovo unveiled the world's first high-gloss stainless magnesium laptop, the ThinkBook X Gen 4. The laptop's casing features a new type of stainless magnesium alloy developed by a team led by Academician Ding Wenjiang and Professor Zeng Xiaoqin from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, giving the ThinkBook X Gen 4 a stunning high-gloss metallic appearance on its sides.
Conventional commercial magnesium alloys are prone to corrosion and oxidation spots, making it challenging to achieve a high-gloss metallic appearance. Addressing this bottleneck, Academician Ding Wenjiang and Professor Zeng Xiaoqin's team spent five years combining high-throughput computing with machine learning techniques, establishing a rapid and extensive computational platform and database for critical corrosion parameters of magnesium alloys. They also proposed dynamic passivation corrosion resistance technology for magnesium alloy surfaces, achieving long-term corrosion resistance and developing a series of high-performance stainless magnesium alloys.
In 2023, building on their accumulated research, the team focused on key processes such as purification preparation of the new stainless magnesium alloy, uniform plastic forming, and optimized heat treatment. In just six months, they successfully developed a low-cost, high-gloss stainless magnesium alloy suitable for consumer electronics' exterior parts. This alloy exhibits a salt spray corrosion rate of only 0.076 mg/cm²/day, more than ten times the corrosion resistance of conventional commercial magnesium alloys, reaching the highest industry standards.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University has long emphasized deep integration of industry, academia, and research, forming a full-chain cooperation paradigm of "research + talent + transformation" with numerous industry key players. The high-gloss stainless magnesium laptop is a remarkable R&D achievement of the collaboration between Lenovo Group and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, selected as one of the "Top 10 Technological Developments of 2023 by Lenovo Research Institute." It has already obtained Carbon Neutral Product certification from the British Standards Institution (BSI), including TCO certification and ENERGY STAR certification, and has also received EPEAT Gold certification.
Currently, Shanghai Jiao Tong University's series of stainless magnesium alloys, following large-scale applications in aerospace, electronic information, and marine equipment fields, have successfully achieved large-scale, low-cost production. They are poised to further expand into civilian sectors such as automotive, communications, and transportation, providing steadfast support for advancing China's manufacturing industry towards green, low-carbon, lightweight intelligent manufacturing.