A new collaboration between leading universities, aims to develop advanced artificial intelligence tools for the design of next-generation turbomachinery, supported by a recent grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Lehigh University, will lead research into novel design tools for jet and rocket engines.
This multi-university effort, part of DARPA's Multiobjective Engineering and Testing of Alloy Structures (METALS) programme, focuses on creating innovative design tools that can simultaneously optimise shape and compositional gradients in multi-material structures. The team will complement these tools with new high-throughput materials testing techniques, using the bladed disk or "blisk" geometry common in turbomachinery as a key challenge problem.
The research tackles a fundamental limitation in current manufacturing and design procedures. Traditionally, engineers must devise a single material composition and set of processing parameters to meet the "one part-one material" constraints of standard manufacturing methods. This approach often leads to inefficient design trade-offs, as different locations in complex components like blisks require varying thermomechanical properties and performance characteristics.
The team sees a unique opportunity in the rapid advancement of additive manufacturing processes. These cutting-edge techniques enable voxel-based composition and property control, potentially allowing for optimised material distribution throughout a component. This could lead to significant performance improvements in structural components, particularly in aerospace applications.
The collaborative effort brings together a diverse group of experts from across the three universities. At MIT, Cordero is joined by Zoltan Spakovszky, the T. Wilson Professor in Aeronautics, A. John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Faez Ahmed, ABS Career Development Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering. S. Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at CMU, and Natasha Vermaak, associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh, round out the team.
This assemblage of talent brings a wide range of expertise to the project, spanning fields such as hybrid integrated computational material engineering, machine learning-based material and process design, precision instrumentation, metrology, topology optimisation, deep generative modeling, additive manufacturing, materials characterisation, thermostructural analysis, and turbomachinery.
The research, funded by DARPA under contract HR00112420303, represents a significant step forward in applying artificial intelligence to aerospace engineering. By merging classical mechanics analyses with cutting-edge generative AI design technologies, the team aims to unlock new possibilities in the design and manufacture of critical aerospace components.