The Intelligent Processing of Materials

摘要

This report covers progress in novel concepts for the development and implementation of Intelligent Processing of Materials (IPM) in the production of advanced materials, with special emphasis on defense applications. IPM is inherently a multidisciplinary effort, combining the latest in materials processing knowledge in the form of process models, novel, in-situ process sensors, and emerging control theory for adaptive control of highly nonlinear processes. The concepts reported below have been studied to assess their value in streamlining the development of new methods for establishing regions of process variable space which are inherently stable, thereby reducing the laborious and experimentally intensive task of process design for production of advanced materials, and to a distributed simulation environment known as the Virtual Factory for rapid prototyping of intelligent control systems, which was originally developed in a parallel research project sponsored by ARPA through NIST. Finally, these new techniques, concepts and capabilities have been applied to the processing of advanced materials for military applications, including near net shape forming of titanium alloy powders to form shaped parts representative of gas turbine engine components, and the growth of single crystal infrared detector materials based upon calmium zinc telluride, which is the substrated material for infrared focal plane arrays. These efforts have been conducted by BDM scientists and engineers, in conjunction with leading university research from MIT and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).