What do the Apple Watch and SpaceX Starship’s Raptor engines have in common?
Answer: Both are made in part from advanced materials that were developed in just a few years (rather than the usual decades) with the help of computers in a field pioneered by MIT. Now, thanks to a five-year, $7.2 million grant from the Office of Naval Research, eight MIT professors—including one of the inventors of the field, known as computational materials design—are working to make it possible Become stronger.
This work is part of the next phase of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) announced by President Barack Obama in 2011. MGI is developing “an essential database of parameters to guide the assembly of material structures,” much like the Human Genome Project. The genome project “is a database that guides the assembly of living structures,” said Gregory B. Olson, Thermo-Calc Professor of Practice in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). The special basic database structure for materials, called “CALPHAD”, was invented at MIT in the 1950s and was first commercialized by Thermo-Calc, the company that supported Olson’s professorship.
The goal is to use MGI’s database to discover, manufacture and deploy advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, according to the MGI website.
MIT researchers will focus their efforts on steel “because it’s still the material [the world has] The study lasted the longest, so we have the deepest fundamental understanding of its properties,” said Olson, the project’s principal investigator. These fundamental properties are the key to a growing steel database that controls everything from chemical composition to process temperature sequences. Content to design new high-performance steels.
In January, about 60 researchers met for a two-day meeting at MIT to share progress so far and future initiatives for such cybersteels, or steels designed entirely computationally. The conference is hosted by the multi-institutional “CHiMaD” Center for Layered Materials Design, the MIT Steel Research Group (SRG), QuesTek Innovations, and the MIT Materials Research Laboratory. Olson was a co-founder of SRG, QuesTek and CHiMaD and remains affiliated with all three companies as well as MRL.
From printable steel to advanced ship hulls
Cybersteel can have a variety of applications, including steel made through 3D printing, which is changing the way naval aircraft components are made. Olson’s materials design company, QuesTek, has used computational design techniques to qualify Cybersteels for flight as a naval aviation component. The Office of Naval Research is also interested in developing nonmagnetic steel for use in ship hulls. “Submarine detection is based on magnetism, so if you can remove the magnetism, you have New invisibility abilities.”
Olson remembers that in 1985, no one knew whether computers could design new materials. Eventually, however, he and his colleagues proved they could do it, and President Obama announced MGI.
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MIT’s cybersteels project will include work ranging from expanding our understanding of molten steel (led by DMSE Professor of Metallurgy Antoine Allanore) to economic modeling of new steels (led by Esther and Elsa A. Olivetti). DMSE Career Development Professor Harold E. Edgerton.
Another major area of research involves the boundaries between the microscopic grains that make up steel. Olson said that while the overall thermodynamics of steel are well established, “we need to make progress on interfacial thermodynamics” — the grain boundaries. Experimental work for this purpose will be conducted by DMSE Associate Professor of Metallurgy C. Cem Tasan and DMSE Associate Professor James M. LeBeau. Theoretical work on grain boundaries will be led by Christopher A. Schuh, DMSE’s Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor of Metallurgy, and Jeffrey C. Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor of Environmental Systems and chair of the Department of Materials Science. and engineering.
Olson will work with Professor David M. Parks of the Department of Mechanical Engineering to incorporate simulations of steel toughening mechanisms early in the design process. Historically, simulation has been used in the later stages of design.
Olson is excited about the future. “We have [already] The success of this technology exceeded my expectations. It was awesome to see it take off. “