Verification and Validation of ICME Methods and Models

It is believed that substantial cost, schedule, and technical benefits would result from broad development and implementation of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) for aerospace propulsion applications. One of the key challenges to the development and implementation of ICME is the need for consistent and accepted approaches or standards for verification and validation. This represents a difficult and far-reaching issue: potential ICME applications span an enormous range of physics, materials science, manufacturing, and mechanical engineering areas, and applications include all phases of materials and processes discipline - from alloy and processing development through materials behavior and life prediction in service. Commercial suppliers of finite-element-method (FEM) software invoke systematic methods to verify the embedded code and validate the implementation of physics within their FEM products. Unfortunately, the nascent materials modeling realm does not have either agreed upon validation methods or standards whose application convey the magnitude of modeling errors and the range of model applicability. Materials modelers lack benchmark problems whose exact solution is known or alternative widely accepted high fidelity models against which predictions can be compared. Instead, model developers usually must rely on data to test newly developed materials models. However, given the diversity of materials and processes, a model developed and validated against data from one subset of materials may not work for other materials. In this presentation we describe a strategy for the development of standard approaches for the verification and validation of materials models for use in ICME applications.