In the Spring issue of The Bridge, a publication from the National Academy of Engineering, Jim Warren, director of the Materials Genome Initiative, the National Institute of Standards and Technology,  highlights QuesTek’s achievements in Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) and its ability to accelerate materials R&D. In Jim’s words “ICME has several decades of demonstrated use by industry to concurrently design materials for insertion in products, vastly reducing the time and cost and showing a near-order-of-magnitude return on investment.”

Below is the excerpt where Jim speaks to the impact QuesTek’s ICME work has had on the MGI. You can read the full article here. 

Perhaps one of the most remarkable stories of the successful use of ICME comes from the small company QuesTek Innovations. QuesTek has been using ICME techniques as its core technology to solve alloy development problems for a variety of industrial clients for several decades, and in 2012 QuesTek sold their technology to Apple while remaining in business for themselves. Apple subsequently used the QuesTek approaches to develop many of the metals found in their products, such as the Apple Watch and iPhone. In time, QuesTek-trained people migrated to SpaceX, where their approaches have allowed for massively accelerated alloy development to be deployed on their rockets. In support of the MGI, in 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) supported several Quantitative Benchmark for Time to Market Framework case studies, one of which was the QuesTek alloy Ferrium M54 which was developed in about six years from conception to deployment on a US Navy aircraft (far shorter than the usual fifteen to twenty years typical of alloy development and deployment times).