AFRL equipped for White House Materials Genome Initiative plan

  • Published
  • By Robyn Mack
  • AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE --  In early December, the White House introduced the Materials Genome Initiative Strategic Plan to guide the nation's efforts in cutting time and costs in bringing new materials and manufacturing products to market.

As the Air Force's leader for the discovery, development, and integration of warfighting technologies, the Air Force Research Laboratory is poised to leverage and pilot efforts supported by the initiative to enable modeling and simulation for materials scientists and engineers.  AFRL is implementing MGI through its own internal effort called Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering.

"It can take 10 to 20 years to develop and transition a new material for an Air Force application," said Dr. Chuck Ward, AFRL's ICMSE lead and Co-Lead for the MGI Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council. "So, clearly we need to do better in order to provide the most advanced and cost effective materials and manufacturing solutions to the warfighter. We'll use the technology developed under MGI to much more rapidly and cost effectively deliver new materials and advanced manufacturing to meet demanding performance requirements in Air Force applications such as infrared detectors, survivability, jet engines, human assessment, weapon system sustainment, and hypersonic vehicles."

According to Thomas Lockhart, the director of AFRL's Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, the organization has already began to implement MGI in their work and research contracts through the ICMSE technical philosophy.

"We now see MGI-related work in nearly everything we do within the directorate," he said. "Whether it's building a new model of material performance to provide predictive capability, or using experimental techniques and data analytics to gain new insights to materials behavior we are making advances on speeding the pace of the materials and manufacturing research and development process."

Dr. Ward explained that component designers currently select materials from a fixed database of known properties and performance, leaving little or no flexibility in the component design process. 

"If the material properties in the database don't match the design requirements, a new materials development effort needs to be undertaken.  Depending on the gap in requirements, this effort can take months to several years," the Air Force veteran said. "Our efforts aim to make materials and manufacturing a variable in the component design process to provide the designer many more design options and with greater confidence that the final design will work as intended."

The Materials and Manufacturing Directorate is currently working with its industry partners on two Foundational Engineering Problems to provide this design flexibility in both engine and airframe structural components. 

"We'll be starting a third FEP later this year aimed at improving the performance of ruggedized electronics for military applications, and intend to start a fourth on infrared detectors," Dr. Ward said.

"With these efforts, AFRL is at the forefront of integrating materials design with component design," Lockhart added. "We're also a leading champion of capturing, archiving, and sharing scientific and engineering materials data.  For example, we are currently building an internal [Information Technology] platform that will seamlessly capture experimental data and serve up materials modeling and simulation software in a collaborative tool."

The Integrated Collaborative Environment will allow materials researchers to organize their research projects and data in such a way as to speed internal collaboration while linking them with modeling tools and preserving valuable research assets, materials data, for future research use. 

Under MGI tools like this will allow continued progress and development in the materials and manufacturing arena.

Announced in 2011 by President Barak Obama, investments in MGI to date exceed $250 million. MGI engages all U.S. Government agencies involved in materials science and engineering including the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and National Aeronautical and Space Administration.