Boasting the highest melting and boiling points of all known elements, tungsten has become a popular choice for applications involving extreme temperatures, including lightbulb filaments, arc welding, radiation shielding, and, more recently, as plasma-facing material in fusion reactors such as the ITER Tokamak.
However, tungsten’s inherent brittleness, and the microcracking that occurs while additively manufacturing (3-D printing) with the rare metal, has hampered its widespread adoption.