Share your multi-year production data and we will provide you with AI tools – at no cost – to make your factories perform better. That’s what the US Defense Advanced Programs Agency (DARPA) told US metals, ceramics and composites manufacturers in its DARPA-SN-26-81 request for information (RFI), bearing the title Revolutionizing Industrial Scale Materials Processing, on 25 June.
Seeking responses by 24 July, the RFI seeks engagement that will help eliminate the unpredictability plaguing large-scale materials manufacturing. In a nutshell, weapons systems and platform designers are unable to use average performance for specified materials due to fluctuations in production variables such as composition, heat treatment temperatures, rolling pressure, etc. Instead they are forced to use minimum expected properties – the ‘worst case’ performance statistics. That conservatism, while laudable in one sense, is operationally expensive in another. Every metal structure in American systems and platforms is better than required, simply because designers assumed the worst.
According to DARPA documentation, many aluminium alloys in the 7000 series demonstrate performance margins 15% or higher than minimum specification values. That is not an abstract theoretical statement: it translates directly to aircraft carrying more payload, vehicles weighing less for given protection levels or missiles reaching out to touch someone at greater ranges.
Characterising large-scale materials processing as more art than science, DARPA proposes to adopt a physics-informed computational modelling approach to analyse multi-year production data to identify causal relationships between data and outcomes and establish quantitative models exploitable by any trained technician. The net result, the agency believes, will be to produce tools tailored to an individual company’s equipment, processes and historical data to improve throughput in existing facilities without requiring capital investment.
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China has invested heavily in materials manufacturing and DARPS believes it is time for America to push the pedal to the metal and increase its margin of superiority in this realm. Adversary systems that populate the horizon of American and allied defence planners are not just weapons and platforms: industrial systems also demand attention and, where possible, radical innovation at an acceptable cost.
Headline image: Increasing materials performance parameters without the need for recapitalisation could massively affect potential savings and enhanced systems performance for US industrials. (US Army)
