ICMD® Expands Capabilities with New Fatigue Toolkit for Microstructure-Sensitive Fatigue Life Prediction

EVANSTON, Ill., March 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- QuesTek Innovations is proud to announce the expansion of the ICMD® materials design and engineering platform with a Fatigue Toolkit developed to enable users to predict fatigue life as a function of material, microstructure, and loading scenario. This enhanced feature of the ICMD® platform represents a significant leap forward in fatigue analysis, leveraging mechanistic, physics-based modeling to improve prediction accuracy and engineering efficiency. This proven approach to modeling minimum fatigue life can be combined with limited testing using the Accelerated Insertion of Materials (AIM) methodology within ICMD® to save 70% in testing costs vs traditional full design of experiments approaches for qualification of fatigue critical materials.

ICMD®'s Fatigue Toolkit combines physics-based simulations with microstructure and defect digital twins, enabling engineers to improve safety, reduce costs, and make data-driven decisions for material selection, design, and deployment.

Addressing Industry Challenges

Current state-of-the-art fatigue modeling primarily relies on empirical data fitting or linear elastic fracture mechanics, both of which have significant limitations. Empirical models lack predictive capability and require large safety factors, leading to costly overengineering. Fracture mechanics approaches, while useful, only address macroscopic crack propagation after significant damage has already occurred.

The ICMD® Fatigue Toolkit introduces microstructure-sensitive fatigue modeling, using crystal plasticity simulations, to enable engineers to predict crack formation and microstructurally small crack growth phases, which is particularly crucial for high-cycle fatigue applications. By incorporating microstructural attributes, this approach reduces reliance on conservative safety factors, leading to both safer and more cost-efficient engineering solutions.

Industry Applications

ICMD®'s Fatigue Toolkit has already demonstrated success in industry engagements, helping companies optimize material selection, enhance supplier qualification requirements, and accelerate certification processes. Examples include:

• Material Selection Trade Studies – Used in aerospace applications to evaluate high-cycle fatigue performance of various competing alloys, enabling physics-informed material selection.
• Supplier Qualification Optimization – Helps OEMs define more precise qualification requirements by considering microstructural influences on fatigue performance, reducing variability across material suppliers and improving supply chain resilience.
• Accelerated Qualification for Additive Manufacturing – Applied in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to streamline the qualification of additively manufactured materials, significantly reducing required experiments (shortening timelines from years to months) and cutting qualification costs by up to $2 million.

Fatigue Toolkit Key Features:

• 3D Digital Microstructure Generation – Statistical digital twin of grain size, orientation, morphology, inclusions, and porosity.
• Material Model Calibration – Uses cyclic stress-strain data to enable custom calibration of plasticity models.
• Customizable Loading Scenarios – Supports varied multi-axial or uniaxial strain states, strain ratios, and fatigue cycles.
• Multi-Stage Fatigue Prediction – Tracks fatigue life from crack incubation to long crack growth predicting full fatigue life in high and low cycle fatigue.
• Streamlined CPFEM Integration – Enables computationally efficient, physics-based fatigue simulations.
• Component-Scale Fatigue Analysis – Integrates with finite element simulations for real-world fatigue predictions.

Seamless Integration with Alloy Design Toolkit

The toolkit expands ICMD®'s capabilities beyond static property analysis, enabling fatigue life prediction directly from alloy composition and processing parameters. It includes validated models for key engineering alloys such as nickel-based superalloys (e.g., IN625, IN100), titanium alloys (e.g., Ti64), high-strength aluminum (e.g., AA7075-T6), and martensitic steels (e.g., Ferrium C64).

Data Security & Compliance

Your innovative materials research deserves the highest level of protection. Within the ICMD® platform, data security is high priority, so you can focus on pushing the boundaries of material science with confidence. QuesTek is ISO 27001 and SOC 1 certified, ensuring compliance with industry-leading security standards. Our platform employs advanced encryption policies to safeguard your proprietary data, keeping your intellectual property secure while you leverage our cutting-edge fatigue modeling capabilities.

About QuesTek

QuesTek's Materials by Design® and ICMD® technologies are proven to reduce the development time and cost and increase the performance of novel materials. In its market space, QuesTek is the first and only provider to execute the full cycle from novel design to production, certification, and flight operations with proprietary materials, in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional, or purely algorithmic methods. QuesTek.com

Media Contact:
Andrea Metzler
[email protected]
(847) 328-5800

SOURCE QuesTek Innovations