DMREF: Thriving While Detonating - Materials for Extreme Dynamic Thermomechanical Performance

About This Grant

The ability to reliably order our groceries or takeout, enjoy rapid package delivery, check the weather forecast, and navigate with GPS is all a part of the United States’ ever-growing space economy. One promising breakthrough in propulsion technology that could enable more affordable and efficient access to space is the Rotating Detonation Engine (RDE), a revolutionary engine concept now under active development. An RDE generates power through sustaining a circulating detonation wave in an annular chamber at thousands of meters per second, achieving power levels orders of magnitude higher than conventional engines, while providing higher efficiencies, more compact designs, and higher thrust-to-weight ratios. While the RDE technology is advancing rapidly, the lack of established material solutions to contend with the extreme thermomechanical loadings associated with detonation remains a critical barrier to deployment. Current testing has reported material failures after only a few engine cycles, with no clear consensus on ideal materials. Metals, composites, and ceramics are all being explored. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) project aims to tackle this materials barrier by establishing a synergistic platform informed by the Materials Genome Initiative. It will integrate industry collaboration and a partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory to accelerate the design of high-performance copper alloys and testing protocols for the kinds of extreme dynamic conditions found in RDEs. Through a strategic combination of (i) multidisciplinary research encompassing materials science, materials informatics, mechanics, aerodynamics and combustion, (ii) organization of workshops and conferences with academic, government and industrial participation, and (iii) educational and outreach initiatives to undergraduate students and the K-12 community, this project will establish a new hub of materials discovery and design for extreme aerospace environments and help train the next-generation workforce. This DMREF project will leverage a generative AI multi-agent framework to enable closed-loop design of copper-based alloys for extreme dynamic environments, using both cold spray and directed energy deposition additive manufacturing. This framework will coordinate experimental and simulation activities through an uncertainty-responsive model, guiding material design through iterative learning. A unique aspect of the project is the development of a first-of-its-kind miniaturized RDE material testing platform, specifically designed and instrumented to rapidly screen candidate materials under realistic RDE conditions. In addition, this project will integrate reduced-order models for cyclic and high-strain-rate material performance and generate damage and failure mechanism regime maps, providing fundamental insights into how composition, microstructure, and gradation may mitigate high-frequency, high-amplitude thermomechanical loads. The resulting knowledge will not only advance copper-based alloys but also provide transferable principles for designing broader classes of structural alloys via additive manufacturing and coated materials systems for propulsion and power generation. This project is supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) of the Directorate for Engineering (ENG), and the Division of Materials Research (DMR) of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.