Combat aircraft, such as the US F/A-18, need to be able to adapt their wings to be transported on aircraft carriers. Currently, the system used by combat aircraft to achieve this consists of mechanical and very complex mechanical pieces. But according to a recent study, published in Materialia Act, This could change with the use of alloy with high temperature form (HTSMA).
The authors of the study, led by Ibrahim Karaman, have analyzed alloys with memory of form with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) to increase the efficiency and performance of combat planes. This technology It could allow folding the wings of combat aircraft through electrical heating and coolingwhich would facilitate a more efficient movement.
The HTSMA would make the plane It would move with less weight and greater efficiencywhich means that more airplanes would be ready to fly at greater speed with optimal use of energy. There is only one problem: to date, memory alloys have had a problem and they are usually quite expensive. To solve this, the Karaman team suggests that AI and high performance experimentation can be combined to accelerate the discovery of materials and reduce development costs.
This means that the process It could be done faster, resulting, more efficient materials at an affordable cost. Designing new materials requires trying thousands of metal mixtures to find adequate, since even a tiny change can completely alter the behavior of the material. Therefore, finding the appropriate combination for alloy could be a random experiment.
“This work shows that we can design better high temperature alloys not through an expensive test and error process, but through a intelligent and specific exploration based on data and physical -says Karman -. This project is exciting, since it demonstrates the potential of advanced marks to develop alloys that we have been developing in recent years. ”
They have used computers and artificial intelligence to predict how the different metal mixtures would interact, thus avoiding the need to test each option in their laboratories. This supposes A considerable reduction in the number of combinations that must be tested in the laboratory.
“This framework not only accelerates the discovery -adds Karaman -, but also Open the door to the adaptation of alloys for specific functionssuch as the reduction of energy loss or the improvement of performance performance in various applications ”.
The goal is to design materials that change in response to heat or electricityas if they were a muscle for machines.
These special materials (actuators) are They use in the aerospace industry, robotics and medical devices. Once this goal was achieved, they could make US combat planes more agile and work better.