VEXTEC Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: OSD09-C01

Description

The proposed effort will create software that will serve as an integration tool to link the results of the material degradation research due to corrosion fatigue into a usable structural analysis tool. Fatigue failure due to corrosion is a multi-disciplinary, multi-scale problem that needs to integrate several mechanisms for accurate simulation of the damage state and better prediction of failure risk. The Navy wants to take advantage of all available corrosion knowledge, methods, models and algorithms to fulfill this vision. The overall concept here is to develop a tool set which has a library of different material microstructures, damage models, solving routines to simulate corrosion fatigue failure. In addition, it will allow users to integrate their individual computational damage models or their solving routines in the software tool. The analogy here is that most commercial finite element analysis (FEA) software tools have a library of their own different element types and solver routines for structural analysis, but also allow users to link their own special solving routines and specialized elements.