Final Report Summary - COMP-DES-MAT (Advanced tools for computational design of engineering materials)
The COMP-DES-MAT project intended contributing to the consolidation of the philosophy of "Materials by Design" and overcome the limitations of existing procedures for developing new materials in engineering, by resorting to computational mechanics techniques.
The emerging additive-manufacturing-based technologies, providing the possibility of industrial manufacturing of large series of parts or components via 3D printing, with engineered complex morphologies of the material at the meso/micro structure, rendering unusual properties not found in nature (meta-materials concept), provided additional motivation to that goal .
Computational mechanics, with the emerging Computational Material Design (CMD) research field, had much to offer in this respect. The increasing power of the new computer processors and, most importantly, development of new methods and strategies for computational simulation, were envisaged as new ways to face the problem of meta-materials design. The project intended breaking through the barriers that hindered these field, by means of the synergic exploration and development of three complementary families of computational techniques:
1) Computational multiscale material modeling (CMM) based on the bottom-up, one-way coupled, description of the material structure in different representative scales.
2) Development of a new generation of high performance reduced-order-modeling techniques (HP-ROM), in order to bring down the associated computational costs to affordable levels, and
3) New computational strategies and methods for the design of the optimal material meso/micro structure arrangement and topology in engineering materials (MATO).
At the end of the project a number of achievements in the aforementioned setting can be reported:
1)New techniques for multiscale modeling of materials. During the project innovative computational homogenization settings, that go beyond the classical Hill-Mandel homogenization, have been developed, i.e: a) extensions of multiscale modelling to fracture of materials, devised for design of fracturing-materials, and b) extensions to accounting for inertial effects (accelerations are not neglected), devised for designing acoustic metamaterials based on local resonance effects.
2)New reduced quadrature-based strategies for hyper-reduction purposes. They provide highly efficient HP-ROM techniques, translating into excellent properties in terms of the achieved speedup and, therefore, into feasibility of multiscale material modelling as for the required computational time.
3)New multi-scale topological optimization techniques for material design. The concept of simultaneous optimization at the micro and macro-scales (coined in the project as concurrent multiscale topological design) considers the simultaneous design of the topology at both scales (material and structure) leading to high additional design potential and benefits.
4)Application of the topological derivative (TD) concept to multiscale topological design, a very consistent mathematical tool that has been extended from isotropic to anisotropic materials, which can be used for a large number of optimization problems considering material distribution and topology.
5)New computational strategies have been developed as innovative tools for multiscale material modelling and coined under the name Smart-Computational-Material-Catalog. Basic HP-ROM information, of families of materials behaviour is inserted into a computational catalog to be integrated, in turn as a plugin, into industrial material simulation codes. This plugin is additionally endowed with advanced computational tools that, using that basic material information, makes it able to return the macroscopic behaviour of the material in a range of situations much beyond the supplied data. This confers to the plugin the character of a smart catalog (somehow connected to the artificial intelligence concept) that makes suitable the exploitation of the idea for industrial purposes. In fact, this constitutes the argument of the ERC Proof of Concept project, granted to the PI in July 2017: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. Call for proposals: ERC-2017-PoC , Proposal: 779611 – CATALOG.
The emerging additive-manufacturing-based technologies, providing the possibility of industrial manufacturing of large series of parts or components via 3D printing, with engineered complex morphologies of the material at the meso/micro structure, rendering unusual properties not found in nature (meta-materials concept), provided additional motivation to that goal .
Computational mechanics, with the emerging Computational Material Design (CMD) research field, had much to offer in this respect. The increasing power of the new computer processors and, most importantly, development of new methods and strategies for computational simulation, were envisaged as new ways to face the problem of meta-materials design. The project intended breaking through the barriers that hindered these field, by means of the synergic exploration and development of three complementary families of computational techniques:
1) Computational multiscale material modeling (CMM) based on the bottom-up, one-way coupled, description of the material structure in different representative scales.
2) Development of a new generation of high performance reduced-order-modeling techniques (HP-ROM), in order to bring down the associated computational costs to affordable levels, and
3) New computational strategies and methods for the design of the optimal material meso/micro structure arrangement and topology in engineering materials (MATO).
At the end of the project a number of achievements in the aforementioned setting can be reported:
1)New techniques for multiscale modeling of materials. During the project innovative computational homogenization settings, that go beyond the classical Hill-Mandel homogenization, have been developed, i.e: a) extensions of multiscale modelling to fracture of materials, devised for design of fracturing-materials, and b) extensions to accounting for inertial effects (accelerations are not neglected), devised for designing acoustic metamaterials based on local resonance effects.
2)New reduced quadrature-based strategies for hyper-reduction purposes. They provide highly efficient HP-ROM techniques, translating into excellent properties in terms of the achieved speedup and, therefore, into feasibility of multiscale material modelling as for the required computational time.
3)New multi-scale topological optimization techniques for material design. The concept of simultaneous optimization at the micro and macro-scales (coined in the project as concurrent multiscale topological design) considers the simultaneous design of the topology at both scales (material and structure) leading to high additional design potential and benefits.
4)Application of the topological derivative (TD) concept to multiscale topological design, a very consistent mathematical tool that has been extended from isotropic to anisotropic materials, which can be used for a large number of optimization problems considering material distribution and topology.
5)New computational strategies have been developed as innovative tools for multiscale material modelling and coined under the name Smart-Computational-Material-Catalog. Basic HP-ROM information, of families of materials behaviour is inserted into a computational catalog to be integrated, in turn as a plugin, into industrial material simulation codes. This plugin is additionally endowed with advanced computational tools that, using that basic material information, makes it able to return the macroscopic behaviour of the material in a range of situations much beyond the supplied data. This confers to the plugin the character of a smart catalog (somehow connected to the artificial intelligence concept) that makes suitable the exploitation of the idea for industrial purposes. In fact, this constitutes the argument of the ERC Proof of Concept project, granted to the PI in July 2017: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. Call for proposals: ERC-2017-PoC , Proposal: 779611 – CATALOG.