ICME & MGI Applied Focus

U.S. President Obama’s Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) highlights the benefits of an ICME approach to develop new materials. As a global leader in the practical application of ICME, our engineering team and tools focus on rapidly designing and developing materials from a conceptual need through product insertion, providing what we call Integrated Computational Materials Design™ service. To do so, we combine our computational technology and our stage-gate design and development process with additional applied skills, resources and expertise, including:

• Applying a Materials by Design computational approach to designing materials that envisions a material as a system of inter-connected subsystems which address specific user-defined performance objectives, which are mapped to specific property targets (determined by material microstructure), which in turn are defined by material chemistry and processing path.
• Applying our unique expertise in Accelerated Insertion of Materials (AIM) and other sophisticated techniques in order to accurately predict property varation at full commercial production scale using limited initial data sets, and to specifically design for robust, economical processing paths. This allows us to significantly reduce project development risks and costs for our clients.
• Leveraging expertise in material prototyping and characterization to calibrate material models and validate material designs. We’re skilled at procuring sub-scale prototypes and evaluating their structures at numerous length scales through a combination of in-house equipment, external QuesTek-operated laboratory equipment, and external laboratories and material testing firms.
• Working to scale-up manufacturing and processing by partnering with a wide group of OEMs, producers, processors, suppliers and other firms to produce, process, test and insert materials at sizes ranging from pilot scale to full commercial scale, and then insert the new materials into products. We’re constantly guided by the needs and goals of our customer and their product design engineers, and by the capabilities of the manufacturers and processors that we work with on a particular material design program..
• Obtaining important industry certifications for materials (such as SAE AMS specifications and inclusion in the MMPDS handbook for aerospace materials) by actively participating in governing technical associations and their committees in order to develop the necessary standards for design engineers to insert materials.
• Obtaining valuable IP by employing QuesTek’s rigorous stage-gate development process, documented engineering notebooks and procedures, and long-term relationships with leading legal firms.
• Licensing IP to producers, processors or OEMs, and commercializing new materials with our licensees, by negotiating and establishing licensing agreements with leading material producers, processors, OEMs, users, or others and then working with our licensees to accelerate sales and production.