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Newswise ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Humans have used metals for thousands of years, but theres still a lot about them that isnt fully understood. Just how much stretching, bending or compression a particular metal will take is determined by mechanical properties that can vary widely, even within parts made of the same material.

Sandia National Laboratories is working to fill gaps in the fundamental understanding of materials science through an ambitious long-term, multidisciplinary project called Predicting Performance Margins, or PPM. From the atomic level to full-scale components, the research links variability in materials atomic configurations and microstructures with how actual parts perform.

PPM aims to identify how material variability affects performance margins for an engineering component or machine part. The goal is a science-based foundation for materials design and analysis predicting how a material will perform in specific applications and how it might fail compared with its requirements, then using that knowledge to design high-reliability components and systems. Materials are such things as alloys, polymers or composites; components are switches, engines or aircraft wings, for example, while systems can be entire airplanes, appliances or even bridges.

Safer, more reliable vehicles, machines hinge on how materials perform

Understanding reliability and performance at the fundamental materials science level isnt important just to Sandias national security missions. Performance is crucial to safety and reliability in spacecraft, bridges, power grids, automobiles, nuclear power plants and other complex engineered systems.

The PPM approach has become a prototype for tackling other difficult materials issues. Materials science researchers recently used the approach in a proposal to understand brittle materials, establishing a multidisciplinary project to develop the fundamental science while delivering improvements during the project to those who use these materials. That way, users dont have to wait years to reap benefits from the fundamental work. Future studies that could benefit from the approach include the aging of polymers and foams, friction between electrical contacts and failures in glass-to-metal seals and in solders and interconnects.

Too often, we are unable to predict precisely how a material will behave, and instead we must rely on expensive performance tests, said program manager Amy Sun. Capturing variability by testing alone is too expensive and not predictive.

PPM simultaneously tackles fundamental materials science issues at the atomic and microstructural scales and engineering problems at the visible scale.

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Engineering Better Machines and Buildings by Understanding Mechanics of Materials