Citrine Informatics today announced its participation in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) INTACT (Intrinsically Tough and Affordable Ceramics Today) program. The program aims to develop exceptionally tough, easy-to-manufacture ceramics by leveraging cold spray processing (CSP) additive manufacturing to significantly increase dislocation density. Citrine Informatics will provide crucial machine learning cold spray modeling to accelerate this development.
Traditional ceramics lack metal-like fracture toughness due to low dislocation densities. The INTACT program will overcome this by using high-kinetic-energy cold spray to achieve large dislocation densities, dramatically increasing intrinsic fracture toughness. This processing-based approach offers broad applications for defense needs like sensing, propulsion, armor, and vehicle structures.
The two-year project, titled R2-D2 C-3PO: Research for Robust Dislocation-Dense Ceramics via Cold Spray Collision Process Optimization, brings together university and industry partners, led by Prof. David Poerschke at the University of Minnesota. Teams at Florida International University (led by Prof. Tanaji Paul), Virginia Commonwealth University (Prof. Arvind Agarwal), Solvus Global (Drs. Pin Lu and Victor Champagne) are leading cold spray process development and scale-up, and the University of Illinois Chicago team (Prof. Matthew Daly) is investigating fracture behavior and dislocation stability. Citrine Informatics (Dr. James Saal) will play a vital role in optimizing the CSP process, leveraging existing machine learning metals-based CSP models to optimize ceramics CSP trials.
This collaborative effort, which includes prior successful collaborations between Citrine Informatics and Solvus Global on other DARPA programs, aims to rapidly accelerate the development and transition of this transformative ceramic technology to the defense industry.