Integrated Computational Materials Engineering A Transformational Discipline for Improved Competitiveness and National Security (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Way Forward: Overcoming Cultural and Organizational Challenges
4 The Way Forward: Overcoming Cultural and Organizational Challenges
Pages 102-126
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From page 102... ...
process, the acceptance by government of its role as a champion and coordinator of ICME, and acceptance in the MSE community of ICME as an inherent component of its overall education, identity, profession, and practice. CULTURAL BARRIERS TO ICME IN THE Manufacturing Industry As described earlier, the IPD process has revolutionized U.S.
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From page 103... ...
Inertia in the Engineering Design Community The relatively rapid adoption by industry of the IPD process and computation ally based multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) indicates that the integra tion of engineering tools and computation has become and will remain a critical element in product design and development.
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From page 104... ...
Engineering organizations capture best practices, provide discipline in the design and execution of engineering programs, and build consistent, validated, and approved computational methods. While these formal engineering practices and product development processes enhance the engineering product, they also retard the adoption of progressive, promising new directions such as ICME.
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From page 105... ...
Given the current state of MSE curricula and com putational materials tools, experienced materials engineers are often ill equipped to develop or use ICME tools to perform their job. They may be skeptical of ICME capability and will insist on acquiring their own data to support their engineering decisions.
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From page 106... ...
Even in IPD, design CAE analysts often work in isolation from manufacturing simulation, and the integration of manufacturing CAE and design CAE is rarely considered. Integrating design, materials, and manufacturing engineering using computational tools and methods will require overcoming orga nizational chimneys, rising above the resistance to change established processes, and adjusting product and process development cycles to provide or receive proper and interconnecting inputs and outputs.
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From page 107... ...
For the Ford Mondeo program, finite element modeling enabled a reduction in test costs of 30 percent, or $12.5 million, over 5 years. Since that time, despite the imposition of more stringent safety requirements, the number of crash tests has been cut in half through the use of CAE. Recognizing the utility and validity of computational crash testing, automakers have shifted their cultures and rely increasingly on CAE to cost-effectively engineer safe vehicles., A critical challenge is providing the human and financial resources required to fully develop a firm's ICME capability.
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From page 108... ...
auto industry. Ford, Gen eral Motors, and Chrysler have selected "Magnesium for Body Applications" as a foundational engineering problem for the consortium, and together they are developing an ICME infrastructure and knowledge base for these materials and the manufacturing processes that are used to fabricate engineering components from them.
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From page 109... ...
In summary, the committee concludes as follows: Because of ICME's relative immaturity, the remaining computational gaps, and the potential for ICME to disrupt current IPD processes, the industrial product development community is skeptical of or unaware of the benefits of ICME. Sustained funding across multiple product development cycles will be required to advance ICME and build confidence in it to the point where it is fully accepted.
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From page 110... ...
Product Design and Manufacturing Materials engineers have adopted an approach to their profession that often focuses on acquiring material property data sets from which they calibrate aver age (nominal) materials properties, sometimes with statistical information, and, in collaboration with CAE analysts, reduce these data to conventional constitutive models for use in performance CAE.
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From page 111... ...
A concomitant increase in the role of materials knowledge in computational system analysis is paramount, leading to quantitative tools used by product engineers and materials engineers working together in integrated teams. MSE Research Within the MSE community there is a tension between the materials-science based, fundamental efforts and the materials-engineering-based, applied efforts.
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From page 112... ...
Materials professional societies have a unique opportunity to foster ICME and make the MSE culture more collaborative and fertile for it. This support can come from assisting the materials research community in the development of standards and taxonomies, encouraging and providing incentives for open access to research results, and providing ICME collaborative Web sites, which can serve as repositories for high-quality data and models that are important parts of these research results.
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From page 113... ...
Whereas a current mechanical engineering graduate often has experience with CAD and FEA software used in a broad spectrum of industrial environments, materials engineering graduates may have had only limited exposure to materials software. Certainly the introduction of ICME will challenge the current skill set of practicing materials engineers.
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From page 114... ...
Additionally, the MSE community has a coordinating body, the University Materials Council (UMC) , whose membership consists of department chairs of accredited MSE programs in the United States who could also provide leadership.
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From page 115... ...
In particular, introducing IPD and the ICME process and culture to MSE practitioners through workshops, short courses, and tutorials in modern MSE computation (simulation methods and tools for predicting materials structure, chemistry, physics, and properties; database min ing; materials informatics; and so on) will raise awareness of the untapped potential David Hibbit, Abaqus, Inc., "A perspective from a commercial finite element software vendor," Presentation to the committee on May 29, 2007.
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From page 116... ...
Finally, the committee believes that alliances between the small businesses who are developers of software tools and MSE teaching institutions can be particularly effective for propagating ICME tools, particularly as students make the transition to engineer ing practice. Role of Small Business in ICME Development During the course of the study, the committee heard from a number of small science and engineering companies that have played a key role in developing, advo cating, and maturing ICME technologies. They have acted at times as the scouts for the OEMs in identifying and integrating MSE research into viable commercial products. In the course of these briefings, the committee learned that one signifi cant concern of the end user of the products discussed is the long-term support and sustainability of the products.
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From page 117... ...
, • Government support (National Institute for Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, National Science Digital Library, and Center for Computational Materials Design) , and • Hybrid government/industry or government/university collaboration (NIST Solder Database13)
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From page 118... ...
The rapid adoption of IPD by industry is further evidenced by the large international participation in IPD conferences; in particular, although IPD was developed in the United States, it has been widely adopted by competitors from abroad, and now licenses for this MDO integration software and attendance at IPD conferences in Japan are reported to be twice that in the United States.18 Based on information from a representative group of small ICME businesses, the committee concludes as follows: Small science and engineering companies are playing a key role in develop ing, advocating, and maturing ICME technologies. They act as the scouts for the OEMs in identifying and integrating MSE research into viable commer cial products.
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From page 119... ...
Absent a significant level of government organization and funding progress, development of ICME will take many decades and might never fully materialize. So far federal research investment in tools for computational materials science has focused mainly on supporting individuals or small teams to develop tools for specific materials technologies.
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From page 120... ...
The experience to date has shown that making progress in ICME capabilities is generally an organizational challenge and that the rate of progress in ICME capability will be directly related to the degree of organization and level of funds directed at the problem. ICME is an emerging discipline.
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From page 121... ...
Some possible examples of foundational engineering problems are listed in the report. The committee speculates that based on the case studies identified in Chapter 2, development of an ICME capability for a given material system to solve a particular foundational engineering problem will require an investment of $10 million to $40 million over 3 to 10 years, depending on the completeness and complexity desired.
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From page 122... ...
While there will most likely be a slight increase in near-term resource requirements to develop an ICME capability, there is potential for long-term efficiency improvements. In a time of increasingly constrained funding for DOD materials research, ICME provides a means to improve the efficiency of the development of new materials systems, in terms of both cost and time.
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From page 123... ...
DOE's NNSA has played a key role in developing computational materials science tools that predict long-term behavior of selected materials of importance in nuclear weapons systems. NNSA's program on the plutonium life cycle, for example, successfully integrated modeling and experiment across scales, employ ing a materials modeling approach that ranged from calculations of the electronic structure of materials to large-scale atomistic simulations to determine the long term properties of microstructural features.
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From page 124... ...
The committee concludes that NNSA laboratories have a unique opportunity to develop such capabilities and to share the ICME framework with the wider materials community. National Science Foundation To derive significant benefit from ICME as a new venue for transformational collaborative cross-functional science in materials, physics, and mechanics, as well as to exploit ICME as an efficient mechanism for providing the outputs of fundamental materials research to the engineering community, the committee has concluded that NSF has a significant opportunity to accelerate considerably the development of ICME.22 The ICME cyberinfrastructure described in Chapter 3 is critical for advancing ICME, and the NSF cyberinfrastructure initiative could be an important source of funding for collaborative, cross-functional international net works in pursuit of NSF's goal of supporting research leading to the development and/or demonstration of innovative cyberinfrastructure services for science and engineering research and education.
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From page 125... ...
Doing so will remove the major constraint on new industrial products: the absence of a computational materials engineering capability in the product development and optimization cycle. ICME is the means to integrate materials into the broader computational engineering.
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From page 126... ...
For ICME to succeed, it must be embraced as a discipline by the MSE community, the community from which this committee is drawn, and changes in education, research, and information sharing must be brought about. The rate of progress in development of ICME will be proportional as well to the participation of academic researchers in information sharing, model integration, and develop ment of an ICME infrastructure.
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