| Abstract |
The overall goal of the project is to contribute to the consolidation of the nascent and revolutionary philosophy of “Materials by Design” by resorting to the enormous power provided by the nowadays available computational techniques. The limitations of current procedures, for developing material-based innovative technologies in engineering, are often made manifest; many times only a catalog, or a data basis, of materials is available and these new technologies have to adapt to them, in the same way that the users of ready-to-wear have to take from the shop the costume that fits them better, but not the one that fits them perfectly. This constitutes an enormous limitation for the intended goals and scope Certainly, availability of materials specifically designed by goal-oriented methods could eradicate that limitation, but this purpose faces the bounds of experimental procedures of material design, commonly based on trial and error procedures.
Computational mechanics, with the emerging Computational Materials Design research field, has much to offer in this respect. The increasing power of the new computer processors and, most importantly, development of new methods and strategies of computational simulation, opens new ways to face the problem. The project intends breaking through the barriers that presently hinder the development and application of computational materials design, by means of the synergic exploration and development of three supplementary families of methods: 1) computational multiscale material modeling based on the bottom-up, one-way coupled, description of the material structure in different representative scales, 2) development of a new generation of high performance reduced-order-modeling techniques , in order to bring down the associated computational costs to affordable levels, and 3) new computational strategies and methods for the optimal design of the material meso/micro structure arrangement and topology for engineering materials |
