User-producer integration for accelerated application development of composite materials

Driven by the need for closer integration between engineering design and materials science, a new approach to the process of specifying and qualifying advanced new materials for structural applications is emerging. It calls for expanding the range of considerations accounted for in this process beyond the fundamental engineering properties, to include additional material–related aspects, such as manufacturing processes, environmental degradation, salvage, and recycling potential. An essential element of the new approach is the link that can be established, for a given application, between functional and material requirements in order to distill quickly the range of potential candidates to a few viable materials and expedite the process of qualifying these materials for the application. An Integrated Qualification Environment, based on a shareable knowledge base of relevant material–related information and a modular suite of integrated models of material behaviour, structural response, and manufacturing process, can provide such a link. It can accelerate significantly the process of application development for new advanced materials by supporting closer, more sustained and rational collaboration between the users and the suppliers of such materials. This is likely to lead to enhanced understanding and confidence levels of component designers in the new material performance that, in turn, should enable more efficient and affordable qualification processes through fewer tests for material characterization, more balanced data accuracy requirements, and the ability to extract more information from each test by using advanced procedures for data reduction, analysis and recording. This paper describes a simplified but representative version of such an 'Integrated Qualification Environment' (IQE) that has been developed in to demonstrate the potential benefits of this concept in the specific case of continuous fibre metal–matrix composites (CFMMC) materials.