Virtual Material Testing to Develop and Optimize New Composite Materials

• 発表時期：2022年
• 学会/論文誌名：NAFEMS Benchmark

内容

Product development and design based on data science has been attracting attention in many industries recently. It is also expected to be applied in the materials industry, which is called materials informatics or data-driven design.

This approach requires a large amount of material database to sufficiently train the artificial intelligence. Composite materials, on the other hand, do not have sufficient material databases, so it is necessary to collect this information through material testing. However, it is not realistic in terms of time and cost to complete the preparation process with realistic material tests. Virtual material testing using FEM has a strong potential to solve these problems. This paper describes a virtual material testing technique based on the homogenization method and its capabilities for interfacing with material database tools.

As a specific use case, we will also focus on lattice structures manufactured by additive manufacturing. Lattice structures can not only contribute to reducing the weight of structures, but also dramatically change the macro-material properties depending on the meso-scale structure. Materials with special behaviors that cannot be realized with homogeneous materials can also be realized. These are called meta-materials. Due to the extremely high degree of freedom in how to create meso-scale structures and the time required for 3D printing, it is very useful to substitute virtual testing for real testing.