Graph-Based ICME Design Tool for Functionally Graded Materials

Functionally Graded Materials (FGMs) vary material properties across their spatial dimensions. FGM components can exploit this variation to overcome property trade-offs and achieve performance requirements that are difficult or impossible to achieve with a single material. However, linear composition gradients between common alloys often face manufacturing challenges that cause significant defects and cracking. Nonlinear gradients can achieve superior properties and avoid these issues by circumventing problematic compositions, but designing such gradients is challenging due to the number of quantities that need to be considered and the high dimensionality of relevant composition spaces. Under this STTR program, QuesTek Innovations LLC (QuesTek) will team with Professors Richard Malak, Raymundo Arroyave, and Ibrahim Karaman at Texas A&M University (TAMU) to develop a graph-based Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) design tool for FGMs. The tool will enable the development of gradient paths between alloys to achieve spatial variations in properties like strength, density, and fatigue life, as well as resistance to wear, corrosion, or creep. Significantly, the tool will support the optimization of user-defined property objectives over the pathway and automatically account for manufacturing challenges such as deleterious phase formation, hot cracking, and mismatches in thermophysical properties. The tool will be created from a novel graph-based design method for FGMs originated at TAMU and hosted with a user interface on QuesTek’s ICMD® software platform. The graph-based approach enables rapid gradient design, workflow extensibility, and the capability to map alloy gradients onto complex 3D geometries. QuesTek will work with TAMU to integrate TAMU’s graph-based python package for FGM design into QuesTek’s ICMD® software platform, including a user interface to define the terminal alloys, composition space, ICME models, design constraints, and optimization objective. QuesTek will integrate the tool with established ICME models to predict relevant quantities such as phase fraction, hot cracking susceptibility, density, stiffness, thermal expansion, and Pugh ratio. In addition to refactoring their existing design code, TAMU will investigate and implement methods to expand and/or connect composition graphs to enhance the tool’s value and reusability for end users. TAMU will also design two unique alloy gradients, manufacture them using Directed Energy Deposition (DED), and characterize them to demonstrate and validate the tool.