Low Cost High Strength High Toughness Corrosion Resistant Materials for Marine Corps Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV)

The goal of this program is to develop and qualify a custom-designed alloy for the United States Marine Corps (USMC) Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), which experiences severe corrosive and abrasive environments, including seawater and sand. In particular, the spindles on this vehicle are mission critical components for operation on land and sea. The spindles are highly loaded and galvanically coupled in a seawater environment with dissimilar metals such as titanium, and to perform successfully, the material from which the spindles are fabricated must have a balance of properties, including high-strength, high-toughness, and good corrosion resistance. QuesTek’s Materials by Design® technology offers a unique opportunity to rapidly design a custom alloy optimized for this application, and DARPA – Accelerated Insertion of Materials (AIM) methodology provides an approach to leverage the same material design models to rapidly qualify this alloy for use. The material toughness and corrosion resistance will be improved while maintaining the same yield strength and material cost of existing alloys. A comparative test program will evaluate the stress corrosion cracking behavior at the relevant corrosion potential of competitive alloys. Demonstration spindles will be manufactured for field-testing. The Option program will produce and characterized a production-scale ingot of the final alloy.