Materials Sciences LLC SBIR Phase I Award, September 2018

With recent advances in additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, components and structures that can benefit from cellular design and optimization are now being realized. Materials Sciences Corporation (MSC) has developed and demonstrated the design and analysis tools needed to optimize cellular (lattice) structures that exploit state-of-the-art manufacturing processes and tailor the frequency response of missile components and associated structures while minimizing weight. Despite these advances, considerable research is required to develop robust structural components for missile structures. In particular, optimization of the strength of cellular structures and verification of their performance via experiments is needed. In response to this need, the proposed research will focus on development of an integrated framework of design, analysis, and test and evaluation methodologies to design structural components using a lattice (cellular) design. Particular attention will be paid to optimization of unit cell architectures and lattice networks for strength, e.g., local yielding, local buckling, global buckling, etc. The result of this research will be a modeling framework of design and analysis for the development of scalable lattice (or cellular) architectures to optimize the weight, dynamic response and robustness of structural components for missile applications.