Manufacturing competitiveness is a critical U.S. national interest that can benefit greatly from advanced virtual prototyping supported by high-performance computing (HPC) and related cyberinfrastructure (CI). The vision of the Manufacturing Modeling, Simulation and Data Analysis Discovery (MSAD) Program is to spur computational science and CI research through interaction with industry. The MSAD program approaches this issue through two distinct, but related, activities. The first activity is research transfer, the study of the issues that arise when applying computational science research to industrial problems. The second activity is challenge creation, the identification of research areas (such as parallel solvers and CI technologies) whose solutions will support industrial competitiveness. We study these issues from a small company perspective by collaborating with a medium-sized manufacturer in Youngstown, Ohio.
We examine issues that arise in the creation of a modeling application for metal-ceramic composite materials. This application will model the displacement chemical reactions at the solid/fluid interface, in which sacrificial oxides are reduced by a molten metal and subsequently form a ceramic/metal composite. The application will be hosted in a CI environment leveraging back-end HPC resources and will be optimized for HPC execution. The benefits of the project will be (1) improved modeling tools for high performance light weight materials for products such as body armor and braking systems, (2) improved cyberinfrastructure tools for deploying industry modeling and simulation tools, (3) the identification of the technical transfer activities and research challenges in modeling metal-ceramic materials. Activities such as these are critical for the competitiveness of small to medium sized companies and play a key role in the national economic recovery.
The economic competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing is critical to maintaining a high standard of living. Large firms such as Procter & Gamble, John Deere and General Motors have built internal simulation capabilities for product design and testing. Our project focused on the technical issues involved in creating accurate, fast, easy-to-use simulation tools for smaller manufacturers. We worked with TCON Fireline, Inc., a small manufacturer in Youngstown, Ohio who produces a ceramic-metal composite material. The composite material has many applications, including (1) design of high performance lightweight, next-generation body and vehicle armor easily fabricated into complex shapes; (2) design of lightweight vehicle braking systems for better fuel economy and vehicle handling, performance, and safety; and (3) next generation of advanced materials to contain or process molten aluminum, with enhanced performance in the corrosive, high-temperature environments. Our cross-disciplinary team consisted of a chemistry effort designing a model for the composite and two computer science efforts building software. The first software project optimized a simulation program for use on supercomputers. The second software project created easy-to-use web interfaces for such simulations. The web application work has been used as a basis for a number of examples and has been referenced by a cloud computing startup company. By creating commonly available software and services, modeling and simulation will allow smaller U.S. manufacturers to design and produce better products at reduced cost.
