Below is an excerpt from a feature article by QuesTek business development director Jeff Grabowski and senior client solutions engineer Kerem Taskin published online and in the September issue of Aerospace Manufacturing and Design Magazine.

The first century of humans in flight – both above the clouds and in outer space – was supported by a largely analog approach to materials engineering. Progress through the years was steady as technology advanced to continually stretch our understanding of what was possible.

Now, a digital transformation of materials has drastically changed the industry, and the evolution continues today. Trial-and-error experimentation is becoming a thing of the past, as more errors can be sussed out long before any test flight can take place.

One of the tools leading the revolution is QuesTek’s ICMD^® (Integrated Computational Materials Design) software. Its impact on aerospace materials, manufacturing, and design is already evident. Timeframes for the creation, testing, and certification of novel materials can be cut in half, removing years of experimentation and millions of dollars from the equation.

But ICMD also helps push technology further, solving existing problems that currently constrain the limits of what humans can do and where we can go. ICMD uses computational physics-based modeling and powerful toolkits to enable materials design, accelerated qualification and certification, informatics and analytics, and simulation. This approach simulates complex systems of testing materials for different performance attributes.

Whether creating new materials or improving the properties of existing ones, there are four main pillars of QuesTek’s ICMD capabilities.

• Alloy design
• Material qualification
• Optimizing existing processes
• Additive manufacturing

Continue reading at Aerospace Manufacturing and Design.