NCAL: NIST Center for Automotive Lightweighting

Summary

Our objective is to support the efforts of the United States of America (USA) automotive industry and its material suppliers to incorporate advanced lightweight materials for improving fuel economy and electric vehicle range to meet fleet-wide emissions requirements, while maintaining safety (i.e., crashworthiness). We do this by developing foundational measurements, test methods, and standards for characterization of complex, multiaxial, multi-strain-path, and high-strain-rate material properties and behavior.

Description

The ongoing development of new, advanced lightweight materials presents opportunities for the USA  automotive industry to produce better, more reliable and less expensive products provided the new materials can be efficiently manufactured. The use of lightweight materials in automobiles, such as aluminum alloys, high-strength steels, and polymer composites, can improve vehicle performance and passenger safety while reducing long term energy costs. While our project is mainly engaged with the automotive and industry and suppliers, our work and interests are not exclusive to that industrial sector.  

As a demonstration of automotive lightweighting efforts, only two people are required to lift and move an automotive car body.

To help industry realize this potential, we produce unique mechanical testing methods including: multiaxial testing to characterize the sheet metal anisotropy, intermediate strain rate testing for forming and crash performance, and tension-compression testing for forming with drawbeads. With these unique test machines and leveraging standard test methods, we produce data on industrially-relevant sheet metal alloys incorporating state-of-the-art measurement techniques including digital image correlation, diffraction based stress measurement, thermography, and crystallographic texture and phase composition and evolution [LINK-pending].  We incorporate all of these with plasticity modeling and advanced full-field deformation modeling to improve our understanding of the materials as well as improve the models for forming processes. 

To aid in material design and production we perform  detailed characterization of the initial sheet metal anisotropy and how the anisotropy evolves with changes in  crystallographic texture and phase composition  to determine their combined role on mechanical performance and formability.  With our experience and knowledge, we lead international standards activities to transition advanced mechanical testing metrology and methods to industrial practice, while maintaining existing standards critical to industry.  Our outputs include new or improved international documentary standards, good practices guides,  benchmark data sets, data management practices, methods to virtualize laboratory control systems along with new or improved measurement techniques with quantified uncertainties. 

To accomplish our work and disseminate the results, we partner with industrial collaborators, consortia, universities, standards bodies, and scientific organizations.  We perform a wide variety of test methods (uniaxial, forming limit, tension-compression, intermediate strain-rate, cruciform 4-arm planar biaxial, and 8-arm planar biaxial) that often combine several measurements (digital image correlation, thermal imaging, diffraction stress measurement, and microscopy). 

Typical collaboration opportunities include post doctoral fellowships through the National Academies, NIST Professional Research and Experience Program (PREP) for undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent graduates or research faculty, formal collaborative agreements through the NIST Technology Partnerships Office (TPO), NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program, NIST Summer High School Intern Program (SHIP), or informal arrangements for small research tasks. Please use the contact information shown on this page or any of the specific research activity pages for more information and availability.

NRC Research and Fellowship Opportunities

Below are our current post-doctorate fellowship opportunities.  

• Advancing State-of-the-Art Material Phase and Crystallographic Texture Characterization
• Direct Measurement of Multiaxial Yield Surfaces
• Identifying Material Behavior from Measurements and Simulations in Advanced Mechanical Testing
• Development of a Digital Twin Framework for Metal Additive Manufacturing
• Finite Element and Crystal Plasticity Modeling for the Development of Lightweighting Materials
• Exploring Material Behavior Across Scales: Mechanical Characterization, Microstructural Analysis, FEA/AI/ML Modeling, and Automation Approaches

Major Accomplishments

See individual project pages for details.