| AVS 60th International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| Accelerating Materials Discovery for Global Competitiveness Focus Topic | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session MG+EN+MS-WeA |
| Session: | Education for Interactive R&D & Industrial Implementation |
| Presenter: | E. Sapper, Boeing Research & Technology |
| Authors: | E. Sapper, Boeing Research & Technology P. Kinlen, Boeing Research & Technology |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The aerospace industry has continuously driven major developments in material science as technology has evolved from wood and fabric to lightweight metal alloys and advanced polymer composites. Future aerospace materials systems will require even more advanced technologies, such as those afforded by smart and responsive systems like electroactive polymers and composites. The unique properties of these materials provide the ability to construct intelligent systems which produce a defined, predictable response to an input.
Concurrent with state-of-the-art chemical technology, the increasing availability of high-performance computing power has facilitated the entry of various computational simulation and modelling methods into the research and development production cycle. Quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, and multi-scale simulation approaches, developed and applied within a Materials Genome Initiative paradigm, are providing insight into aerospace material properties of interest, such as species-specific transport rates, electrochemical response, service lifetime prediction, material color and appearance, and quantitative structure-property relationships.
The ultimate goal of a coupled experimental-computational approach is the closed and tightened feedback loop between laboratory results and computational predictions. This leads to the incorporation of more theory into experimental practice as well as more heuristics into computational method development, expressed in the form of semi-empirical models and empirically-pinned property response surfaces. This presentation will review some of the challenges involved in applying advanced computational methods alongside state-of-the-art laboratory procedures. The development of novel, more environmentally friendly aerospace coatings that release site-specific corrosion inhibitors on-demand will be presented as a case-study in closed-loop computation-experimentation.