Materials Breakthrough for the Transportation Industry

Rising energy prices and heightened environmental concerns are intensifying the global push for quantum gains in materials performance. In all major industries, there is an acceleration of the longstanding unfulfilled demand for lighter, stronger, and more affordable materials. The lack of a leap forward in materials performance continues to be a brake to progress in many industries, but no industry is constrained more by the long absence of a breakthrough in materials performance than the transportation industry.

Other industries have been spurred by breakthroughs and are making rapid progress towards goals once considered to be at the outer limits of their technological potential. For example, the Internet has revolutionized the telecommunications industry, and the emerging map of the human genome promises extraordinary progress in medicine and biotechnology. But, the materials industry has not achieved a comparable breakthrough. No outsized gains have been made in materials engineering in the past 50 years, and a revolution in transportation remains an apparition.

As a consequence, the transportation industry is increasingly reliant on composite materials. But, composites lack precision in their makeup and sufficient predictability in their performance, and their greater costs exceed their margins of performance versus traditional materials. As an alternative, materials scientists have explored foam technologies. But, like composites, foams lack precision and predictability, and the costly processes for producing foams fail to realize a balance between density and porosity. Thus, the long-awaited breakthrough in material performance remains elusive.

To achieve extraordinary advances, the transportation industry requires materials that are lighter, stronger, safer, and more affordable than conventional materials. Engineers are pursuing these ideal parameters through increased precision in both design and manufacture to achieve greater uniformity and concomitant predictability in materials performance. For example, engineers are developing nanoscale and microscale material systems, using computational combinatorial methods to develop new materials with novel properties, and integrating sensors and actuators into structures to make them “intelligent” [1,2]. Graded material concepts are being used to improve material distribution in structures and, at the atomistic level, engineers are developing manufacturing systems that use probes in atomic force microscopes to assemble atoms into precise molecular arrays of material [3,4].

Figure 1. In an effort to make products lighter, stronger, and more affordable, the transportation industry is relying on a wide range of increasingly more complex, scarce, and expensive materials.

But, a breakthrough remains remote. Conventional engineering techniques have not evolved to achieve sufficient precision and uniformity to generate a dramatic increase in materials performance. The goal seems clear, however. A quantum gain can be achieved through a solution that aligns material mass with enough precision to optimize material distribution in a product. Historically, this has been a recurring theme in materials engineering, whether the search has been for maximum density or maximum porosity in materials morphology. So, it seems that the elusive solution may be a structural technology that is based on a calculus that balances the variation between the two extremes.

With such a technology in hand, materials research and development (R&D) could be brought into sharp focus, ending the wide-ranging and unresolved search of recent decades. Near- and long-term R&D agendas could focus on the deployment of this technology to achieve the long-awaited breakthrough in materials performance. These agendas could establish a clear strategy and direction for materials R&D to drive a revolution in transportation that would reverberate through other industries and throughout the European economy. Technological history suggests that, given the overlong and relentless search for such a breakthrough technology, it must be on the horizon. Indeed, by virtually any standard, it is long overdue.

The most promising technology on the near horizon appears to be Reflexive Materials Technology™ (RMT™) [5]. This novel structural technology has the elemental underpinnings and potential for ubiquity that distinguishes a breakthrough technology. RMT affords the design, engineering, and manufacture of optimal structures, because it minimizes the amount of material(s) required to form a product, while optimizing the structural integrity of the product. Unlike current technologies, RMT provides both the design precision and fabrication control to produce products made of the least amount of material(s) sufficient to assure reliable stress/strain management according to performance specifications. With RMT, the ideal parameters listed above finally can be realized through a systems approach to materials development that combines structural solutions with materials & process solutions (Figure 2). Such an approach was recommended for cost-effective and competitive materials development by the transportation industry in a 1993 study conducted by the National Research Council’s Committee on Materials for the 21st Century [6]. RMT provides the quantum leap in materials performance necessary to ignite the long-awaited revolution in the transportation industry.

Figure 2. Structural and materials & process solutions timelines.

RMT engineering optimizes materials performance by controlling the manner by which structures are permitted to address load and, consequently, to undergo strain. It is particularly advantageous for weight-limited applications where a high strength-to-density ratio, high stiffness, and affordability are important. RMT operates independent of scale and materials, with the same effect, whether at the molecular (nano-) level or at the human-made (macro-) structural level. These characteristics provide an excellent springboard for quantum gains in materials performance that could rival the impact of the Internet on the communications industry and the emerging map of the human genome on medicine. The breakthrough in materials performance enabled by RMT could drive extraordinary advances in transportation and other weight-sensitive industries.

RMT achieves design precision and fabrication control through distributed porosity™. To strike the essential balance between density and porosity, RMT inculcates discrete, symmetrically aligned pores into structures made with metals, polymers, ceramics, composites, and other materials. This is the RMT Architecture™. The interplay of the symmetrically aligned pores, or voids, within an RMT-engineered structure, steers and spreads the stress of external loading along the truss-like struts of the RMT Architecture and throughout the structure. This stress steering™ minimizes the development of tensile strain in a structure in favor of maximizing compressive strain.

The key to RMT stress/strain management is the sphere-like geometry of the Truncated Rhombic Dodecahedron (TRD), shown in Figure 3. Figurative TRD cells shape an RMT structure, similar to the way soap bubbles shape a froth, or foam [7]. However, unlike the irregular distribution of bubbles in a froth, conjoined TRDs in RMT structures are aligned symmetrically in a face-centered cubic (FCC) configuration that spontaneously creates a corresponding FCC array of voids in the structure. The void array gives an RMT structure a framework, or skeleton, of the octa-tetra design. The struts of the RMT Architecture are triangulated and loaded axially and are short and fat to optimize their capacity to carry compressive load. This unique architecture generates an isotropic material response, producing the optimal mechanical response by RMT-engineered structures independent of the loading state. Each RMT-engineered structure is optimized for a particular application by a particular iteration of the RMT Architecture.

Figure 3. (a) Truncated Rhombic Dodecahedron (TRD) and (b) naturally occurring TRD, in a mesoporous silica material [8], that might be the basis for self-assembling and self-healing RMT-engineered materials.

To simplify and speed the design, engineering, and manufacture of RMT-engineered materials, products, and structures of uniform quality and performance, a new computational tool is required. Development of this computer-based tool must be a cornerstone of any near-term R&D agenda. The intent would be for this practical tool to permit the precision design, optimization, and manufacture of a vast number of RMT-engineered products with optimum ease and efficiency through computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). The goal would be for this new enabling tool to allow engineers and others to use high-performance computing to inaugurate a new era in materials engineering and create a new generation of superior materials, products, and structures through RMT.

The end-goal, of course, would be to afford the manufacture of commercial RMT-engineered products of uniform quality and performance at competitive costs utilizing CIM techniques. Developed specifically for RMT commercialization, RMT rapid manufacturing systems™ readily lend themselves to integration into CIM systems. RMT manufacturing systems are now in the patent process. Fortunately, it appears that through simple modification of conventional manufacturing technologies, RMT rapid manufacturing systems can be incorporated into most existing manufacturing facilities with only modest capital investments. Development of techniques for the rapid and cost-efficient integration of RMT manufacturing technologies into existing manufacturing plants and facilities would be integral to a near-term R&D agenda.

While RMT can frame the agenda for near-term materials R&D, industry demands for lighter, stronger, safer, and more affordable materials must dictate near-term materials R&D priorities (Figure 4). Thus, a prime near-term goal must be to re-engineer the architectures of existing products, components, and structures using RMT, to rapidly enhance the in-service performance of both intermediate and final products whose designs are already proven through practical application and use. The results promise to be extraordinary, because RMT requires at least 5% to easily 50% less material to make products and build structures that outperform today’s versions. Simultaneously, near-term R&D must focus on the proper selection and optimal utilization of RMT rapid manufacturing systems for cost-effective production of RMT-engineered products and structures.

Figure 4. Framed by RMT, industry priorities will dictate the agenda for near-term materials R&D to produce lighter, stronger, and more affordable products.

To rapidly achieve quantum gains in materials performance and ignite a revolution in transportation, near-term materials R&D must enable the development of RMT-engineered products and structures that yield significant economic, environmental, safety, and energy-related benefits. Near-term R&D must direct the efforts of transportation engineers, for example, toward exploitation of the advantages of RMT to achieve the optimal balance between performance and cost in existing vehicles, whether in the air, on the surface, or in the sea. Near-term utilization of RMT to re-engineer existing designs to create lighter, stronger, stiffer, and more affordable products would lead to:

Long-term, R&D drivers are primarily economic, not scientific. Therefore, long-term RMT R&D must focus on the development of new RMT-engineered products to satisfy the transportation industry’s commercial agenda (Figure 5). Historically, 95% of products that utilize a new technology are yet-to-be-determined at the inception of a technology’s use. Long-term materials research must be aimed at developing affordable new materials, with economical and environmentally sound lifecycles (from raw material to repair and recycling), that can be produced in large quantities using “green” engineering concepts [6].

The focus must be to develop new materials that exploit the structural advantages of RMT, which emphasizes the compressive strengths of less expensive, less technical, and more abundant materials. New materials also should be developed to exploit the precision of RMT rapid manufacturing technologies, which emphasize low-cost, automated manufacturing processes that are continuous from raw material to finished product. Achieving long-term RMT materials R&D goals also must include continued refinement and development of computational tools to support a comprehensive concurrent RMT-engineering approach as part of evolving CIM technologies.

While RMT is the long sought engineering solution that can trigger quantum gains in materials performance, it also is the solution for generating the verve and excitement that will restore youth to an aging industry. Reflecting a global trend, over the past seven years in the US aerospace industry the number of workers ages 25-34 declined to only 17% of the workforce and the number of engineers and scientists performing R&D declined 30% between 1998-1999. Europe has a rare opportunity to exploit this trend to its competitive advantage by pioneering a technological breakthrough that will attract the energy and creativity of youth through open-ended opportunities for seminal innovations and the concomitant potential for extraordinary economic gains. To fully capture the advantages of RMT, Europe’s long-term R&D agenda must include educational programs to replenish and revitalize its ranks of materials and transportation engineers and scientists.

Figure 5. Long-term materials R&D must satisfy the transportation industry’s business agenda by exploiting the unprecedented commercial advantages of RMT.

RMT precision and predictability open a new era of concurrent innovation, allowing existing products to be improved and new products to be developed. To realize the promise of RMT, industry and governments must work in concert. Industry must be the prime mover and governments across Europe must provide critical R&D support and new infrastructure. In particular, industry and governments must combine and focus their resources via transnational and interregional cooperation to deploy a new generation of RMT-engineered transportation systems, including airplanes, ships, trains, and cars, along with the infrastructure to support these systems, including RMT-engineered runways, roadways, railways, bridges, and piers. These new transportation systems can be the foundation and impetus for an unprecedented and extended era of broad-based economic growth and prosperity in the European community.

Materials research for transportation is application specific by nature. It is not simply research to reveal a material with interesting properties that may lead to some useful application somewhere along the industrial spectrum. It is not research to devise a method for the efficient processing of raw materials into fabricated materials or finished products that may be commercially viable in some market. Materials research for transportation is perforce targeted to meet the competitive requirements of the transportation industry, specifically the European transportation industry. Thus, it is not research in the traditional sense. It is materials development, because it has a commercial target. In essence, it is materials engineering. It is the simultaneous engineering of materials, processes, and software to produce commercial products that meet the requirements for Europe’s transportation industry to be competitive in global markets.

Unlike pure materials research, materials engineering targeted for the transportation industry must be integrated and comprehensive. To meet the standard of commercial success, materials engineering requires the simultaneous optimization of the plethora of design, engineering, and manufacturing considerations in the train of steps for the conversion of raw materials into products. Each discrete consideration must be optimized against the others to assure commercial viability. The core purpose of this rigorous process of simultaneous engineering is to achieve an optimal balance between cost and product performance. This same requirement extends to materials research and development (R&D), because its success ultimately is measured by commercial standards. This means that materials R&D cannot be a standalone process. It must be integrated into the overall progression for engineering competitive products for commercial markets.

Because of this vital continuum from idea-to-final-product, a single technological thread is essential to connect materials R&D to the marketplace. The underlying technology must foster simultaneous engineering, and it must be comprehensive in its utility across the entire development spectrum to afford a systematic approach to the concurrent design, engineering, and manufacture of materials and products that meet the competitive demands of the transportation industry. These demands are for lighter, stronger, and more affordable components, subassemblies, and products. Thus, the underlying technology must be sufficiently robust to optimize the cost-sensitive performance of the multitude of products created from metals, plastics, ceramics, composites, and other materials, including biomaterials.

Only one technology appears to afford this potential for fully integrated and systematic materials development. It is Reflexive Materials Technology™ (RMT™), and it is appropriate for service as the underlying technology for the “EU Future Materials Research Schema for Transportation,” outlined in the following diagrams:

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