Progress in Microstructural Control, Multiscale Failure Mechanisms and Green Manufacturing Technologies for Advanced Metallic Materials

With the iterative upgrading of aerospace propulsion systems, deep-sea exploration equipment, new-energy battery carriers and extreme-environment nuclear power structural components, conventional metallic materials face severe bottlenecks in synergizing strength and toughness, ensuring long-term service life, and maintaining environmental friendliness under complex multiphysics coupling conditions. Traditional alloy design, heavily reliant on empirical trial-and-error and single-principal-element solid-solution strengthening, struggles to simultaneously satisfy the demands for high strength, high electrical conductivity, corrosion/wear resistance and lightweighting. Conventional thermomechanical processing and surface treatment techniques often induce elemental segregation, residual stress concentration, and interfacial brittle-phase precipitation during nonequilibrium solidification or severe plastic deformation, leading to premature component failure under thermal cycling, corrosive media, or alternating loads. This review focuses on precise microstructural control, multiscale failure mechanism elucidation, and green/low-carbon manufacturing processes for advanced metallic materials. It systematically summarizes core advancements over the past five years in high/medium-entropy alloy (HEA/MEA) system design, thermomechanical processing of lightweight structural alloys, advanced additive manufacturing technologies, and vacuum metallurgy/hydrometallurgical recovery strategies. From four dimensions — thermodynamic/kinetic modeling, strengthening/degradation mechanisms, interfacial evolution laws and circular recycling pathways — we provide an in-depth analysis. We clarify the critical roles of precipitate morphology control, heterogeneous structure construction and surface gradient modification in enhancing the strength–ductility synergy. Furthermore, we synthesize the multimechanism coupling laws governing high-temperature oxide film reconstruction, micro-galvanic corrosion suppression, fatigue crack deflection and active thermal stress release. Integrating industrial in-situ measurement data with life-cycle economic assessment, we propose a process optimization roadmap tailored for low-carbon metallurgy and high-end equipment manufacturing. This review aims to bridge the complete chain of “thermodynamic calculation[Formula: see text]process parameters [Formula: see text] microstructure[Formula: see text]macroscopic properties[Formula: see text]service life[Formula: see text]circular recycling,” providing interdisciplinary theoretical references, technical guidelines and strategic decision-making support for materials scientists, metallurgical engineers, structural designers and policy makers.