Micromechanics-based Computational Modeling for Accelerating the Design of Advanced Composites

The United States has been the world leader in aviation and space, particularly in the area of composite materials. However, the time and cost of new product development, and material certification remains unacceptably high in a fast paced global economy. To retain the US global competitive advantage in aerospace industry, NASA has lunched the Advanced Composites Project (ACP), with the goal to utilize computational tools to accelerate the development and certification processes of new composite materials. Proposed here, is a project to develop novel micromechanics-based computational modeling that can be used to predict the strength and failure of composite materials. Through this program, we will strengthen our collaborations with NASA researchers and enhance our research capability on micro-scale modeling of advanced composite materials. The specific goals of this project are to develop/optimize and validate micromechanics-based models for the design and analysis of composite structures. The proposed project supports NASA's technical and educational missions by training students in science and engineering disciplines.