Session: 03-02-03: Advanced Manufacturing

Paper Number: 138525

138525 - An Icme Approach for Sf-Cmcs via Diw at Elevated Temperatures 

SiC has long been a popular thermal structural material for hypersonic applications owing to its excellent thermal shock resistance and great strength retention at high temperatures. The utilization of ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) has increased in recent decades. Incorporating a tougher second phase can improve monolithic ceramics’ limitations in toughness while maintaining their thermal resistance properties.

The long processing time and high expenses of traditional manufacturing methods, such as chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) of CMCs, have inspired the emergence of advanced manufacturing alternatives. Direct ink writing (DIW) is one of the most promising routes. DIW is an extrusion-based technique where the ink, loaded with either preceramic polymers or ceramic powders, is pushed through a nozzle. This process requires the ink to exhibit shear-thinning behaviors such that the ink can flow through the nozzle and withstand its weight once loading is lifted off. The printed green parts are then dried and sintered into ceramics. Other than high scalability and versatility in material choices, the key feature that sets DIW apart is the shear alignment of fibrous reinforcement along the printing direction during the extrusion process. The inclusion of highly anisotropic fiber reinforcement not only greatly increases the toughness and applicability of CMCs but also brings more uncertainties to the resulting performance. Currently, there are few efforts to investigate the effects of the properties of short fiber reinforced ceramic matrix composites due to fiber alignment variance at elevated temperatures.

The authors propose a manufacturing-driven multi-scale integrated computational material engineering (ICME) framework to model short fiber reinforced ceramic matrix composites via DIW. Information about the distributions of both the aspect ratios and orientations of the fibers is passed along from the direct ink writing process. Given the fiber volume ratio, representative volume elements are established to provide material properties of the composite for various fiber aspect ratio when aligned in one direction. With the distribution of fiber orientations expressed as Euler angles, the effective mechanical and thermal material properties can be calculated and then mapped onto the specimen to be tested for performance. The FEA model is implemented in MOOSE. The model consists of three coupled modules—damage phase field, elasticity, and heat transfer. The effects of short fibers’ aspect ratios, alignment orientations, and temperatures on material performance are studied through standard tests, using short carbon fiber reinforced silicon carbide as demonstrations.

Presenting Author: James Chen University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Presenting Author Biography: Dr. James M. Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University at Buffalo (UB). He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering with a minor in applied mathematics at The George Washington University (2011). Prior to joining UB, He was an Assistant Professor and the endowed Steve Hsu Keystone Scholar at Kansas State University (2015-2018). He has published ~50 peer-reviewed journal articles in multiscale computational mechanics, theoretical & computational fluid dynamics and atomistic simulation for thermo-electro-mechanical coupling. He received the Young Investigator Award from AFOSR in 2017, the Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the Wichita Council of Engineering Societies in 2018 and the Rising Star Award from the Electrostatics Society of America in 2021,. His research at MCPL has been supported by DoD, DoE, NSF and NASA and recognized by numerous media outlets, including a feature article in Aerospace Testing International (UK), and a radio show in Austria. His current interests are on compressible turbulence, supersonic/hypersonic flow physics, high temperature ceramics matrix composite, uncertainty quantification and data science. He is also a Fellow of ASME and an Associate Fellow of AIAA.