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Uncertainty Driven Engineering for Heterogeneous Media & Structures

Thursday, March 15, 3:30PM – 5PM
POB 6.304

Timothy Breitzman

Current design solutions exhibit an overarching trend of engineering on increasingly finer and finer length scales. As a result, a single material may be comprised of a hierarchical set of substructures spanning many decades of length. Benefits of such engineered materials and structures include tailored response, ultra lightweight strength, and multifunctionality. Aerospace systems, which strive to reduce parasitic materials, are benefitting from this capability. Current and future platforms will feature technologies such as embedded antennae and structural thermal protection systems, which use microstructures to augment the structural properties with additional functionalities, shaving weight and reducing the lifecycle cost of the system. Currently fielded technologies of advanced composite materials are already representing this trend and are stretching our capabilities to manage the uncertainty of their coupled responses.

Each length scale upon which a composite is engineered adds potential for the augmentation of capabilities, but also increases the complexity. Hence, it is critical to understand how the features at each of these disparate scales interact to produce the overall response. Computational materials science is one way the nearly endless design space can be explored and ultimately filtered to approach an optimal blend of efficiency and function. Many have recognized this opportunity to utilize the dramatically increasing computational power to guide experiment and foster new scientific breakthroughs.

One barrier to the rapid exploitation of new advances is that composites designed with such highly tailored capabilities introduce unprecedented levels of uncertainty in the static, dynamic, and long-term durability responses of the system. Often, the engineer is left with a point solution when the information which is really required for design is the probability density function of the response over many service environments. Only through this expansion of the current predictive capabilities will the pipeline of materials solutions truly be primed to accelerate the timeline for both design of new materials and transition of materials from workbench to industry.

In this talk, we present one project focused on bounding the response of a textile composite material across several length scales and relate it to the current practice for managing the uncertainty and risk in engineering materials and structures. A discussion of an integrated computational materials science and engineering paradigm will be introduced which, when integrated into the structural design loop, will significantly expand the design space and enable increased efficiency, performance, and affordability by delivering materials and structures optimized across all engineered scales for their mission.

Bio:

Timothy Breitzman is a Materials Research Engineer in the Composite & Hybrid Materials Branch of the Materials & Manufacturing Directorate in the Air Force Research Laboratory. He is also the co-lead for the Directorate Center of Excellence on Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering. His research includes the study of damage initiation and strength in composite and hybrid materials and the development of multiscale methods for heterogeneous media. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Eastern Illinois University in 2001 and his master’s and doctoral degrees in Mathematics from Louisiana State University in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He worked for the University of Dayton Research Institute from 2005-2006 and for Universal Technology Corporation from 2006-2007. He is currently serving a term as Chairman of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Committee on Fastening & Joining (2009-2012).

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