Multiscale Systems Engineering for Nanocomposites

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0310596.

The Multiscale Systems Engineering for Nanocomposites (MSEN) project brings together a team of multidisciplinary researchers and educators to address the need for modeling, simulation, and design methods of heterogeneous material systems based on multiscale principles. Advances in nanotechnology are expanding our vision of materials, devices, and systems to span spatial and temporal dimensions as small as the nanometer and the femtosecond. Modeling, simulation and design have lagged behind and do not offer the ability to optimize products and processes to take full advantage of this new understanding of interactions at all scales. While components of this technology are under development, there is a need to develop a cohesive framework. The MSEN project, supported by NSF, NY State and Industry, is a critical first step in this direction.

Fundamental advances in physical sciences and the development of new measurement and characterization tools have made it possible to understand spatial and temporal phenomena on the atomic, molecular, microscopic, and macroscopic scales.

The ability to consider interactions across the multiple scales is a pre-requisite to the consideration of design decisions that can be made on each scale critical to the performance of the final product.

The ability to translate these advances into new products and industries requires a transformation in the methodologies of engineering modeling, simulation, and design. Interactions across multiple scales affects the ultimate behavior of the complete system, and engineers must learn to model and design across this range of scales.

While many physical principles are specific to their domains, the challenge of representation across scales, automatic synthesis of reliable simulations, optimization of design decisions, propagation of uncertainty across scales, and validation of multiscale methods are core issues that map across applications, and can best be addressed through the development and application of multiscale systems engineering concepts.

The MSEN project is focused on the development of advanced modeling, simulation, optimization, and control technologies to provide the basis for nanocomposite design where the systematic exploration of alternatives is supported by a hierarchy of models that provides a consistent description of multiscale phenomena. These technologies build upon adaptive simulation methods that account for scale interactions, employ parameter optimization and process control, and operate using computationally efficient parallel software.

The MSEN project involves industry partners in the selection of research directions and the development of enabling technologies. Multiple polymeric matrix nanocomposites applications of importance to U.S. industry are being addressed.

Key physical and temporal scales to the behavior of polymeric matrix nanocomposites.