HYPER META: Hypersonic Metamaterials

With emerging manufacturing technologies, engineering design is no longer limited by traditional component manufacturing processes and intrinsic material properties that arise from crystal microstructures. Rather, complex small structures, i.e., mesostructures, may be produced by additive manufacturing (AM) to reduce weight by up to 90%, integrate components and functionality, and tune effective material properties.  Current engineering design and analysis techniques, tools, and software were not developed for multifunctional components and systems with variable, tensor material property fields enabled by mesostructures. The tools required to navigate the burgeoning design space with mesostructures and advanced composites are in development. To inform this development, exploration of the design space, understand the tradeoffs, identify multi-objective optimization functions, develop advanced material models with effective tensor properties, and ultimately map the mesostructures to the hypersonic systems is required. Therefore, the current challenge in AFRL/RW is to apply mesostructures to a variety of novel hypersonic designs to improve manufacturability and performance in a parallel approach. In response to this need, ReLogic Research Inc. proposes development of an innovative suite of software for development of advanced material models with effective tensor properties to map the mesostructures to systems and a corresponding multi-objective optimization capability for exploration of the design space and understand the tradeoffs for hypersonic applications. ???????