VEXTEC is honored to be part of this year’s AIAA SciTech Forum (The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). As the world’s largest aerospace technical society, AIAA’s annual SciTech Forum and Exposition is the preeminent event for aerospace research and technology. The 2021 event was originally scheduled to be held in our home city of Nashville, Tennessee; unfortunately due to the pandemic it has been restructured into a virtual event.

Our CTO Dr. Robert Tryon presents “Computational Simulation of Fatigue Failure Risk for Additive Manufactured Metal Structures” on Wednesday, January 20 in a joint session of Nondestructive Analysis and Materials (NDA-15/MAT-19) titled “Realizing ICME, Including UQ and Experimental Validation”.

This presentation will discuss a computational fatigue prediction software to simulate additive manufactured (AM) metal products to determine the risk of fatigue failure of the product. An integrated computational material engineering (ICME) toolset in the software uses probabilistic microstructural crack nucleation and small flaw fracture mechanics to predict the effects of microstructural features on the various stage of cyclic damage accumulation. Traditional structural finite element methods are used to model the stresses in the product. Microstructure, defects and surface roughness are all modeled within a random field throughout the product. In-process monitoring provides increased confidence in the random field parameters of each part; i.e. a digital twin. The fatigue model captures the interaction of the stress with the microstructure, defects and surface roughness to predict the probability of a crack nucleating and growing to failure at each location in the product. Extensive laboratory work has been performed to calibrate and validate these models. This computational solution to determine fatigue risk and predict product durability has the potential to greatly advance the usage of AM technology. The abilities to rapidly design, prototype, and certify AM parts also have the potential to save significant time in development schedules.