Next-gen LDRD: COMIC aligns high-risk research with mission needs

Press/Media: STE Highlight

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Each year the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program at Los Alamos selects high-risk, high-reward research to fund for a finite time. The Directed Research (DR) component is LDRD’s flagship investment, which explores mission solutions via multi-disciplinary teams. For fiscal year 2020, 14 DR proposals were funded at LANL. Among them is a particularly unique project led by Laurent Capolungo (Materials Science and Technology; MST-8) and John Carpenter (Sigma).

Cross-discipline, cross-generation

“Control of microstructural instability in composites, or COMIC, is so interdisciplinary it could only be accomplished at Los Alamos,” Capolungo said.

COMIC is a “Materials for the Future” project that aims to discover damage-resistant metals. That will require (1) making new materials, (2) characterizing those materials, and (3) predicting how those materials will fail. Capolungo and Carpenter are calling upon Los Alamos experts from Sigma, MST, X-Computational Physics, Materials Physics and Applications, and Theoretical to realize this vision.

 

Beyond field experts, the LDRD funding enables Capolungo to involve early career scientists as well. “It’s an opportunity to invest in the next generation,” Capolungo said, “and I’m excited to mentor them.”

It’s critical to design materials that will fail

The premise of COMIC is to design nano-metallic laminate composites that will fail in a predictable way. They want to be able to predict how, when, and why the material failed. Being able to model and predict a material’s behavior will close the loop on understanding the relationship between microstructure and performance.

The specific traits they are trying to tease apart are plastic anisotropy and material interfaces. These tend to be conflated factors. The new materials these researchers are making will offer complicated and different interfaces—diffuse with secondary phases. These go beyond the normal definition of a complicated interface, such as an immiscible semi-coherent interface.

“Previous LDRDs have shown that tailoring interfaces through process control can lead to combinations of highly desirable properties, such as thermal stability, high strength, and resistance to irradiation damage,” Carpenter said. “However, in this program, we are not as interested in improving material properties, rather we want to fundamentally understand and develop predictive models for why materials fail. This knowledge is what unlocks a paradigm shift in materials engineering where the ‘weak links’ that lead to failure in a given application can be understood and avoided during manufacturing.”

Right now, engineers build in “safety factors” to control for uncertainty in material lifetime, and this often leads to heavier-than-necessary components in energy applications, such as nuclear reactors and automobiles. Gaining a better understanding of the relationships between failure, loading conditions, and material microstructure will streamline engineering and material selection for national security and beyond. COMIC will pave the way toward modeling and designing more resilient metals processed through conventional or advanced manufacturing techniques and exposed to extreme environments. 

Forethought on program transition ensures mission relevance

Capolungo and Carpenter are marking a number of milestones with COMIC, and ensuring mission relevance is one of them. Often, transitioning LDRD programs upon completion of their three-year funding is not guaranteed because the research at the completion of the funding period does not always continue to align well with mission needs. COMIC will be approached differently.

“We created a stakeholder advisory board,” Capolungo explained, “and we will touch base with them every six months or so to discuss aspects of the project that could be relevant to mission needs.” This advisory board’s feedback will help shape the LDRD research as it moves through its funding period, before transition. This method represents a new style of interaction that will promote tight coupling between scientific discovery and LANL missions, as they both evolve over the course of the funding period.

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Mechanical response of Cu/Nb subjected to uniaxial tension (T) or compression (C) along the rolling (RD) normal (ND) or transverse directions (TD). As shown, three different failure modes can be triggered in the same material system.

PeriodNov 1 2019

Media coverage

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Media coverage

  • TitleNext-gen LDRD: COMIC aligns high-risk research with mission needs
    Date11/1/19
    PersonsRicardo A Lebensohn, Saryu Jindal Fensin, Nan Li, Laurent Capolungo, John S. Carpenter, Rodney James Mccabe, Abigail Hunter, Arul Kumar Mariyappan, Xiang-Yang Liu, Xiang-Yang Liu

Media Type

  • STE Highlight

Keywords

  • LA-UR-19-31889

STE Mission

  • Global Security

STE Pillar

  • Materials for the Future
  • Science of Signatures

STE Publication Year

  • 2019