ATA Engineering, Inc. SBIR Phase I Award, August 2018

Compression-molded short-fiber composite (SFC) materials have several advantages over metallic and continuous-fiber composite (CFC) materials, including greater part complexity, improved dimensional stability, and low-cost/high-volume production.However, introduction of novel SFC material systems is stymied by the need to perform costly and time-consuming testing programs to generate allowables, design values, mechanical properties, and statistical distributions thereof. To provide this information earlier in the product design cycle, ATA Engineering proposes to extend an existing composite material property prediction framework (COMPAS) for applicability to SFC materials by developing two new analytic modules. The first module, a data mining utility (DMU), will interrogate a material database of SFC and like CFC materials to (1) fit characteristic equations that represent property trends as a function of material parameters and (2) utilize an innovative collaborative filtering algorithm to predict unknown SFC material properties. The second module is a physics-based multiscale finite element modeler, which will employ an enhanced binary modeling approach to explicitly represent the fiber microstructure, resin matrix, and interface in part-scale meshes to simulate material response.The Phase I effort will provide proof of concept for the software tools and analytic methods prior to extensive development and validation in Phase II.