DMREF/GOALI: Novel 3D Experiments, Simulations, and Optimization for Accelerated Design of Metallic Foams

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Open-cell metallic foams are an exciting class of structural materials that comprise a network of interconnected metallic ligaments, resulting in an interesting foam architecture. These low-density materials have garnered much attention over the past two decades based on their recognized potential for use in multi-functional applications. For example, in addition to serving as light-weight, load-bearing structures, open-cell metallic foams have the potential to serve concurrently as electrodes for energy-storage devices, as hosts for newly generated bone and blood vessels in biomedical implants, or as impact absorbers and noise insulators for advanced high-speed ground transportation. Despite their potential, the widespread deployment of open-cell metallic foams for a broader range of multi-functional applications remains hampered by inefficient, trial-and-error manufacturing approaches. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award supports a joint academic-industry research effort to enable more efficient and intelligent design of open-cell metallic foams, and to achieve precise control over their performance for targeted applications. The results will provide dramatic improvements for the industry by increasing both the manufacturing efficiency and the tailorability of the foams, which will help to expand deployment of the foams throughout the energy, defense, biomedical, aerospace, and automotive industries. The research team will host outreach activities to expose students in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate school to this multi-disciplinary STEM research.This DMREF GOALI award supports research to enable an accelerated and performance-based design paradigm for open-cell metallic foams through the integration of emergent methods in 3D materials characterization with multi-scale modeling and Bayesian optimization. The new design paradigm will be made possible through the discovery of process-structure-property relationships in the foams. The specific objectives include: experimentally modifying manufacturing parameters to produce variants of open-cell metallic foams; performing 3D synchrotron-based crystal-orientation measurements and in-situ X-ray computed tomography experiments to gain unprecedented insight into the hierarchical structure and multi-scale deformation mechanisms of the foam; using high-fidelity, multi-scale (grain-to-continuum) finite-element modeling to investigate micromechanical behavior and predict performance of the as-manufactured foams; conducting virtual tests on synthetic-foam variants to further populate a metallic-foam design space; and using Bayesian optimization on the simulation-based results to enable selection of optimal hierarchical structures (i.e. topology and crystallography) for targeted performance metrics. The research will be a first to decouple the effects of ligament topology and underlying crystal structure on micromechanical behavior of open-cell metallic foams (including microbuckling, local accumulation of slip, and distribution of crack-nucleation sites), which is postulated to influence its performance.