At the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, scientists and engineers have been studying how they can make higher-performance materials for soldiers at lighter weights. The challenge has led to the ARL Enterprise for Multiscale Research of Materials, made up of in-house research and most recently, two cooperative agreements. Researchers will develop materials to protect soldiers in extreme dynamic environments, and create energy efficient devices and batteries.
Johns Hopkins University will lead the materials in extreme environments collaboration. Major partner institutions are the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the University of Delaware, and Rutgers University. University of Utah will head ARL's multiscale modeling research. A number of institutions will work towards multiscale modeling: Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Harvard University, Brown University, the University of California (Davis), and the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy.
Right now, ARL researchers have some understanding of the mechanical properties of materials and some understanding of the electronic properties, but over time, they want to blend the knowledge.
They want to come up with a set of models that can fully describe materials' behavior. They are hopeful they will be able to model materials well enough that they can begin to design materials using the models, and predict how they will behave. This would provide insight into a whole new class of material capabilities.
Scientists have to understand the complete hierarchy of the advanced materials and how all of the pieces fit together, then how the levels of hierarchy change during a high-velocity impact.
