VEXTEC Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF192-001

Description

Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers the potential for 30-60% cost savings on complex, high-value parts in the aerospace industry solving numerous sustainment issues facing the USAF. New methodologies are needed that leverage new material characterization methods with advanced computational tools, to quickly link microstructural properties/defects with material/component performance. Development of AM integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) tools are necessary to scale AM for USAF Sustainment. The AM process allows each layer to be inspected with in-situ process monitoring using thermal, optical, or spectroscopy methods as the part is built inside the chamber to determine defect location, size and morphology. Thus, creating a “digital twin� of the part’s microstructure. The Microstructural Digital Twin (MDT) can be fed into ICME tools using probabilistic microstructural analysis to predict the stiffness/fatigue strength of components, quickly determining at the coupon-level, when builds are cheap, whether a given set of process parameters is likely to produce viable parts. VEXTEC Corporation, partnering with Universal Technology Corporation and the University of Dayton Research Institute, will develop an AM-ICME computational tool powered by an MDT. Resulting in a computational framework that accelerates AM process development and validation to provide an affordable, rapid solution for AM component process development.