Converting good ideas into good products takes time. This concept-to-completion task is continually being refined, but it is not always timely. This is especially true in the military, but that may be about to change.
10 years is a long time to wait. When you’re in the business of delivering cutting edge technology in life-or-death situations, that’s a very long time to wait. According to DARPA , that is the average time it takes to field many “new” materials.
Advanced materials tend to come with special processing considerations. Their unique structures and/or properties do not always lend themselves to easy fabrication and incorporation with current technology. Unfortunately, that means some of the newest battlefield technology is already 10 years old.
DARPA’s Materials Development for Platforms (MDP) program is seeking to improve the process, a lot. They want to reduce the time it takes to field new materials by 75%. Try doing your job 75% faster and see if that doesn’t turn heads. Unlike you, DARPA can pool a vast array of assets to focus their efforts for promising materials.
How they plan to pull off this gargantuan task is to work smarter. They describe the process, “The program intends to establish a cross-disciplinary model that incorporates materials science and engineering, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) principles and the platform development disciplines of engineering, design, analysis and manufacturing.”
They are taking a holistic view of the process from the beginning to build momentum faster. Rather than develop materials and then move it to the next step, they are addressing many steps in parallel. Another big shift is an application-driven approach. Instead of developing materials in a general or basic research mindset, they are looking to fast-track materials which meet application demands. The end-user is now guiding research efforts.
Even though engineers are expected to accomplish the impossible on a daily basis, you can’t realistically expect them to produce a material out of thin air which meets every possible need. Basic research must continue, but it can no longer be the only catalyst for technology development.
Researching materials for specific applications is not new, but the concerted effort to develop promising materials should help put new materials in use faster. A multi-scale, multi-pronged approach to materials development may be just the thing to get from discovery to delivery in a quarter of the time.
Image courtesy of DARPA