Document
Demo #26 • Michelle • Nick
A E R O N A U T I C S
Modeling Materials: Design for
Planetary Entry, Electric Aircraft, and Beyond
NASA missions push the limits of what is possible. The development of Multiscale modeling breaks high-performance materials must keep pace with the agency’s demanding, down the elements of material cutting-edge applications. Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center are design factors to their relevant time and length scales. The performing multiscale computational modeling to accelerate development times chemistry of a material can be probed with quantum and further the design of next-generation aerospace materials. Multiscale model- mechanics; its thermal and ing combines several computationally intensive techniques ranging from the mechanical properties, with atomistic techniques; and its atomic level to the macroscale, passing output from one level as input to the micro- and macro-scale next level. These methods are applicable to a wide variety of materials systems.
properties, with continuum methods. As shown in the For example: chart, the output of one level is passed on to the next level, • Ultra-high-temperature ceramics for hypersonic aircraft—we utilized the full creating a powerful predictive model. John Lawson, Alexander range of multiscale modeling to characterize thermal protection materials for Thompson, NASA/Ames faster, safer air- and spacecraft.
• Planetary entry heat shields for space vehicles—we computed thermal and mechanical properties of ablative composites by combining several methods, from atomistic simulations to macroscale computations.
• Advanced batteries for electric aircraft—we performed large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of advanced electrolytes for ultra-high-energy capacity Recent NASA computational batteries to enable long-distance electric aircraft service.
materials projects. Top left: Simulation of ionic liquid elec- trolytes in a nanoscale • Shape-memory alloys for high-efficiency aircraft—we used high-fidelity battery. Top right: Microscale electronic structure calculations to determine phase diagrams in shape- heat flow simulation through fibrous material. Bottom left: memory transformations.
Quantum calculations to de- termine the phases of shape Advances in high-performance computing have been critical to the development memory alloys. Bottom right: Simulation model of thermo- of multiscale materials modeling. We used nearly one million processor hours on set polymer resin used for NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer to characterize electrolytes with a fidelity that ablative composites.
John Lawson, Alexander would be otherwise impossible. For this and other projects, Pleiades enables us Thompson, NASA/Ames to push the physics and accuracy of our calculations to new levels.
Alexander Thompson, John Lawson, NASA Ames Research Center S P A C E T E C H N O L O G Y M I S S I O N D I R E C T O R A T E