Today, computer simulation of products and processes has become an indispensable tool for accelerating development projects and downscaling costs in many industries. This is witnessed by the development of drugs where methods of theoretical chemistry are used to design molecular structures and forecast the way they function as well as by the analysis of macroscopic systems such as power networks.

Simulation is also widely applied in material research in general, and specifically in such areas as program systems for predicting the microstructure and properties of metallic cast components or welding seams depending upon process parameters. There are also programs available for calculating the op-tical properties of virtually any structured surface or heterogeneous material (photonic crystals or mixed ceramic-metallic systems). In the macroscopic setting, numerical analysis of the crash property of cars is already state-of-the-art in the design stage. The material research efforts of the Fraunhofer Society stands alone in simulating the distribution of density and dimensional accuracy of ceramic and powdermetallurgical parts made by pressing and sintering. Likewise, analyzing the service properties of various materials in components or systems requires using methods of finite element modeling to calculate functional properties. This has allowed scientists to assess a broad series of components of functional ceramics and to use the data for improvements of component properties.

So far, engineers have only been able to couple simulation modules working on different length and time scales with one another to a limited extent. This defines it as a key challenge and the Fraunhofer Material and Components Group is joining forces with other institutes of the Fraunhofer Society to come up to it. The aim is to devise both high-performance software architectures and internal software packages for interscale simulation. The idea is to start off with demonstrating selected examples of multi-scale simulation from the atomic level to components including their service properties in complex heterogeneous systems. Mastering these complex simulation jobs will be a cutting-edge factor in the future innovativeness of applied research institutions and even whole economies.

The Group’s agenda includes making multi-scale simulation available to material research and adjacentfields for the entire range of product and process developments in the medium term based upon the prototypical examples to be demonstrated in the next few years.