At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory
scientists and engineers have been studying how they can make higher
performance materials for soldiers at lighter weights.
Army researchers want to enhance
soldiers’ battlefield effectiveness without placing an extra load on their
backs.
The challenge has led to the U.S. Army
Research Laboratory, or ARL, Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials,
made up of in-house research and most recently, two cooperative agreements
awarded in April.
Researchers will develop materials to
protect soldiers in extreme dynamic environments; and create energy efficient
devices and batteries.
Johns Hopkins University will lead the
materials in extreme environments collaboration. The research lab has invested
up to $90 million over 10 years for a five-year initial study that could be
renewed for an additional five years. Among the major partner institutions are
the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Delaware
and Rutgers University.
University of Utah will head ARL’s
multiscale modeling research. The research lab has awarded up to $20.9 million
toward the lighter-weight materials program.
A number of institutions will work
towards multiscale modeling: Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harvard University, Brown University,
the University of California (Davis), and the Polytechnic University of Turin,
Italy.
The goal is to bring together experts
from government, academia and industry to overcome daunting obstacles to
develop new materials.
“It’s a big deal,” said John Beatty, the
Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments collaborative alliance manager, who
is part of the Weapons & Materials Research Directorate, ARL. “We will make
significant advances in designing materials, but our focus with this enterprise
is as much about changing the way people think about designing as it is
anything else.”
Right now ARL researchers have some
understanding of the mechanical properties of materials and some understanding
of the electronic properties, but over time we want to blend the knowledge,
said John Pellegrino, acting director of ARL, who was formerly the director of
the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate, overseeing the
Enterprise for Multiscale Materials Research.
“It is very ambitious to say we will be
able to come up with a set of models that can fully describe materials’
behavior,” Pellegrino said. “But we are hopeful we will be able to model
materials well enough that we can begin to design materials using the models,
and predict how they will behave. This would give us insight into a whole new
class of material capabilities.”
In conjunction with ARL, the consortium
will lead to a more comprehensive study of materials in the future even though
each one is technically independent of the other, Pellegrino said.
The extreme dynamic environments study
will be based from the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, or HEMI, at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, which has been years in the making.
The institute will focus on the behavior
of materials and systems under extreme conditions, said K.T. Ramesh, the Alonzo
G. Decker, Jr. Professor of Science & Engineering at Johns Hopkins
University, founding director of HEMI and a professor of mechanical
engineering.
“We are interested in impact and such
extreme events from a very broad perspective –including high pressure and
high-strain rates,” Ramesh explained.
The science is fundamentally close
enough to address a range of related problems, like homeland security, asteroid
impact and nuclear threats.
“What affects the material is the huge
amount of energy landing all at once,” Ramesh said. “You can’t develop a new
protective material until you can understand what happens to it in extreme
environments.”
Ramesh wants the joint university-ARL
team to both understand fundamental mechanisms and be able to articulate the
findings to anyone coming on board.
“That is one of the measures of
success,” he said.
Each of the partner institutions
involved in the extreme dynamic environments research brings a unique
perspective that combines for a multidisciplinary approach to solving the problem.
For instance, Caltech will use a range
of tools they have developed over 20 years to accurately model the behavior of
materials from the subatomic level all the way to the scale of bulk materials.
“Right now we don’t have a predictive
model for designing advanced materials,” said Kaushik Bhattacharya, Caltech’s
lead and the Howell N. Tyson Sr., Professor of Mechanics and professor of
materials science. “We have some theories that guide us, but they really are
not fully predictive.”
Scientists have to understand the
complete hierarchy of the advanced materials and how all of the pieces fit
together, then how the levels of hierarchy change during a high-velocity
impact, Bhattacharya said.
“We hope to increase the speed of
development as well as the strength of materials through such rigorous
analysis,” he said.
The undertaking may seem huge
considering the time frame for incorporating new classes of materials into
applications now can take as much as 20 years from initial research to first
use.
There are many risks associated with
finding a material that serves the function you need. One major challenge is
even if you succeed, it often doesn’t diminish the cost of similar research
going forward, said Pellegrino.
“Another challenge is that the
complexity of materials has grown,” explained Pellegrino. “Edisonian-approach
research has given us spectacular results in the past. We have gotten better
armor than before, different electron devices, including batteries, than we
have ever had. All of that is great, but what we need now is far more complex
than we have ever needed.”
Soldiers are carrying up to 32 pounds of
batteries to power their technological devices in the field these days.
This is one of the concerns that the
University of Utah-led consortium will address.
“We want to help the Army make advances
in fundamental research that will lead to better materials to help our soldiers
in the field,” says computing Professor Martin Berzins, principal investigator
from the University of Utah.
Besides batteries, partners, such as
Boston University, along with others, will look closely at developing new
approaches for designing smaller and more efficient electromagnetic devices
that meet military needs.
The design simulation research is based
on a five-year plan that could be extended for an additional five years if it
is successful.
“What we are looking for is a
materials-by-design capability that is done by validated modeling from the
smallest to the largest relevant scale,” said Meredith Reed, collaborative
alliance manager for the consortium, and member of the Sensors & Electron
Devices Directorate at ARL. “We want better control and prediction of transport
phenomena in order to get the desired properties to develop new Army
technologies.”
The focus of the program is well-aligned
with the White House Materials Genomes Initiative, or MGI, that has been
underway for about a year to drastically increase advanced materials design, Reed
said.
A White House blog posted May 14
mentioned that achieving the MGI vision demands an “all hands on deck”
approach, with dedicated involvement from academic institutions, industry,
professional societies, as well as government.
“The MGI white paper talks about
creating an ecosystem where manufacturing and development come together and are
more streamlined so that discoveries might not have to take 20 years to make it
to market,” Pellegrino said. “Having that ecosystem increases the chance of collaboration
not only in military-specific problems, but the scientific understanding of
advanced materials design will grow that much faster across the board.”
For more information about the
Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials, visit the White House website.
By Joyce P. Brayboy, U.S. Army Research
Laboratory
From www.army.mil
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