Durability is the ability of a physical product to remain functional without requiring excessive maintenance or repair throughout its design lifetime. Although maximising durability seems to be an obvious goal, it typically requires more resources before operational use, it results in higher reserve factors for structural responses and it comes at a higher cost. Therefore, finding the optimal level of durability during the development process of a product requires models that can accurately predict the use of resources, the structural responses and the overall cost. For composites, the available models are slow, they do not have the required accuracy and lack integration into the design process. D-STANDART aims to make them fast and accurate, promoting their use in the design process thereby enabling a further acceleration of the net-zero transition.
The D-STANDART scope is limited to the improvement of two engineering activities of high-performance composite structures: the evaluation of their fatigue resistance and the characterisation of cradle-to-cradle environmental aspects.
In order to improve the evaluation of the fatigue resistance of composite structures, current material characterisation methods will be improved and new (high-frequency) fatigue characterisation standards will be developed. Also, simulation methodologies will be developed to correctly quantify parameters that determine the fatigue behaviour of composites. Data obtained from experiments will be used in high-fidelity models to simulate defect growth in various lay-ups and at various scales. To apply these computational expensive models in an industrial design environment, D-STANDART develops Artificial Intelligence (AI) surrogate models, trained using the aforementioned high-fidelity simulation data.
For the characterisation of cradle-to-cradle environmental aspects, life-cycle and techno-economic assessments are used. From these assessments, models are generated that allow the assessment of sustainability effects of design alternatives thereby giving product developers the opportunity to efficiently account for sustainability in their decision-making processes
