Optimizing Manufacturing of Metallic Materials by Modeling Microstructure

While manufacturing process modeling capabilities are mature, there is a need to seamlessly integrate process modeling results with various microstructure evolution models. Currently there are several hurdles to link various standalone microstructure evolution models with FEM based process modeling tools. Linking microstructural models need a good understanding of writing user subroutines which can be cumbersome and the data flow between the process modeling tools and microstructural models are difficult to implement. As the microstructure models and process modeling tools evolve, the existing links between them sometimes don’t work as well. There is a need to build an open architecture platform that will easily link process modeling results with microstructure evolution tools. In this project, we propose to investigate a modeling framework and identify workflow requirements to interface finite element method based thermo-mechanical process (TMP) modeling results with external microstructure evolution models which enables a closely coupled, run-time integration of process-structure-property prediction models.