ICMD’s fatigue toolkit combines physics-based simulations with microstructure and defect digital twins.
QuesTek Innovations has added a fatigue toolkit to its ICMD materials design and engineering platform. Developed for predicting fatigue life based on material, microstructure, and loading scenarios, the toolkit enhances fatigue analysis through mechanistic, physics-based modeling, improving prediction accuracy and engineering efficiency. This modeling approach for minimum fatigue life can be combined with limited testing using the Accelerated Insertion of Materials (AIM) methodology within ICMD, potentially reducing testing costs compared to traditional full design of experiments approaches for fatigue-critical materials qualification.
ICMD’s fatigue toolkit combines physics-based simulations with microstructure and defect digital twins, enabling engineers to improve safety, reduce costs, and make data-driven decisions for material selection, design, and deployment.
Addressing industry challenges
Current fatigue modeling mainly uses empirical data fitting or linear elastic fracture mechanics, both of which have limitations. Empirical models do not predict fatigue behavior accurately and require large safety factors, increasing material and design costs. Fracture mechanics approaches, while useful, only address macroscopic crack propagation after significant damage has already occurred.
The ICMD fatigue toolkit introduces microstructure-sensitive fatigue modeling, using crystal plasticity simulations, to enable engineers to predict crack formation and microstructurally small crack growth phases, which is crucial for high-cycle fatigue applications. By considering microstructural attributes, this approach minimizes reliance on conservative safety factors, improving accuracy and cost efficiency in engineering solutions.
Industry applications
ICMD’s fatigue toolkit has already demonstrated success in industry engagements, helping companies optimize material selection, enhance supplier qualification requirements, and accelerate certification processes. Examples include:
- Material selection trade studies – Used in aerospace applications to evaluate high-cycle fatigue performance of various competing alloys, enabling physics-informed material selection.
- Supplier qualification optimization – Helps OEMs define more precise qualification requirements by considering microstructural influences on fatigue performance, reducing variability across material suppliers and improving supply chain resilience.
- Accelerated qualification for additive manufacturing – Applied in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to streamline the qualification of additively manufactured materials, significantly reducing required experiments (shortening timelines from years to months) and cutting qualification costs by up to $2 million.
Fatigue toolkit key features:
- 3D digital microstructure generation – Statistical digital twin of grain size, orientation, morphology, inclusions, and porosity.
- Material model calibration – Uses cyclic stress-strain data to enable custom calibration of plasticity models.
- Customizable loading scenarios – Supports varied multi-axial or uniaxial strain states, strain ratios, and fatigue cycles.
- Multi-stage fatigue prediction – Tracks fatigue life from crack incubation to long crack growth predicting full fatigue life in high and low cycle fatigue.
- Streamlined CPFEM integration – Enables computationally efficient, physics-based fatigue simulations.
- Component-scale fatigue analysis – Integrates with finite element simulations for real-world fatigue predictions.
Seamless integration with alloy design toolkit
The toolkit adds fatigue life prediction to ICMD, using alloy composition and processing parameters. It includes models for engineering alloys such as nickel-based superalloys (IN625, IN100), titanium alloys (Ti64), high-strength aluminum (AA7075-T6), and martensitic steels (Ferrium C64).
Data security and compliance
Innovative materials research requires strong data protection. Within the ICMD platform, data security is a priority, allowing researchers to focus on advancing material science. QuesTek is ISO 27001 and SOC 1 certified, ensuring compliance with established security standards. The platform employs advanced encryption policies to safeguard proprietary data and protect intellectual property while utilizing fatigue modeling capabilities.
For more information, visit questek.com.
