ELDER RESEARCH, INC. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration STTR Phase I: T12

Description

NASA intends to implement components built by additive manufacturing (AM) processes into space-flight systems. To achieve this goal, NASA requires a deeper understanding of the AM process, particularly for current alloy systems and existing AM manufacturing equipment. As a continuation of earlier internal research and development work at SwRI step towards an integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) framework, we propose to develop an extensible framework of the AM process to provide Rapid Additive Manufacturing Build Outcomes - RAMBO. RAMBO will provide thermal histories, microstructure evolution, and material properties of an additively manufactured part built using the powder bed fusion process. We will develop fast-running routines to provide thermal histories during the build process. The thermal routines drive predictions of microstructural features, such as average grain size, material phase fraction, and lack-of-fusion defects. Microstructural features would ultimately in turn drive predictions of mechanical properties (e.g., stress-strain curves) for the additively manufactured material. The focused material system for this initial software development effort will be Ti-6Al-4V. By defining I/O through common interfaces, the RAMBO framework enforces modularity of the software components. As a result, RAMBO will readily accommodate additional physics, new material systems, and novel manufacturing processes provided that the underlying routines conform to the common interface. This software framework would support NASArsquo;s ldquo;Vision 2040rdquo; to provide robust, interoperable, adaptive, and accessible methods.