NSF Award
2301808
The research objective of this Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) project is to investigate new ways to co-consider manufacturing processes in the early stages of materials and product design. By including the considerations of manufacturing processes in the early stages of design, designers can make effective decisions to customize material microstructures and achieve desired product performance, as envisioned by Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME). Current materials design methods focus on sequentially exploring model-based relations of materials and products at individual levels instead of a concurrent realization of products, materials, and manufacturing within a holistic system. The holistic, systems-based, robust co-design approach envisioned in this project will account for the goals of and interactions between multilevel material systems involving the product and the manufacturing processes under uncertainty. The approach will enable designers to concurrently visualize and explore level-specific objectives, multilevel interactions, and sublevel analyses, thus enabling quantitative linkages in digital design to materials structure to manufacturing workflows. The project will promote the progress of science by strategically integrating knowledge and techniques from the fields of systems engineering, engineering design, and materials science to enable a fundamental understanding of the couplings between products, materials, and manufacturing processes. Additionally, by designing new curricula that embed Design for ICME topics and organizing a summer school on the associated tools, students and practitioners will be better prepared to address complex materials design challenges from a systems perspective.<br/><br/>This ERI project will establish foundational techniques for coupling multilevel modeling of hierarchically structured materials, products, and their manufacturing processes with multiobjective systems design strategies and uncertainty management. The research plan consists of two parts: (1) establish history-dependent, data-driven processing-structure-property-performance (PSPP) linkages; and (2) formulate a systems-based inverse co-design framework for exploring ranged sets of robust solutions across multiple levels by managing uncertainty and its propagation. The overall expected outcome is a novel systems-based multilevel framework for the inverse co-design of materials, products, and manufacturing processes in terms of robust decisions made by distributed stakeholders under uncertainty. The intellectual merit includes: (1) a fundamental understanding of the interdependent nature of multilevel materials, manufacturing processes, and product design decisions; (2) an efficient mathematical representation of material structure hierarchy to realize products; and (3) a computational framework for the multilevel robust co-design visualization and exploration of the interactions between the different engineering disciplines (design, material, and manufacturing) in the early stages of design. Four related educational and outreach activities are planned to integrate the research with the broader community of students and professionals: (1) formalize the data-driven PSPP linkage modeling procedure by integrating the results in existing graduate courses; (2) iterate, update, and disseminate a systems-based design approach for standard ICME problems through a new Design for ICME course; (3) organize a one-week online summer school on tools relevant to Design for ICME; and (4) broadly disseminate results through scientific publications, presentations, and research monographs. These activities will lead to new verified and validated techniques to teach Design for ICME; new test examples to iterate, assess, and establish the generic utility of the constructs (individually and integrated); and a foundation for infusing multilevel materials modeling, manufacturing considerations, and decision-based design strategies into ICME workflows.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
