The scientific community has made steady progress in developing tools and methods for prediction of properties and behaviors of materials for commercial and defense products. Simultaneously, commercial industry has made great strides in development of flexible, adaptable manufacturing methods with polymers and metals, spanning conventional thermoforming methods to additive processes. While continuum computational methods for structural and fluid behavior have reached maturity in engineering design and analysis at the macroscopic level, the migration and integration of more scientific methods at discrete scales is very much in its infancy. The ability to bring these tools to bear on the design and optimization of materials holds the promise of greatly accelerated development and open protocols for advanced manufacturing methods and product design. In this talk, I will highlight and discuss some of the methods being explored for computational materials science, in particular the challenges and future research directions needed to advance the state of the science for materials and device design and development in conjunction with flexible manufacturing.

Richard R. Barto, PhD Dr. Rick Barto is Manager of the Computational Physics Group at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs in Cherry Hill, NJ. Dr. Barto also serves as the Deputy Director for the Lockheed Martin Corporate Nanotechnology Initiative, leading the Computational Modeling and Simulation research thrust, whose strategic goal is to reduce cycle time, risk, and cost for nanotechnology-derived sensors and structures, and pioneering tools for design and manufacturing process optimization.

Prior to joining Lockheed, Dr. Barto worked for Allied Signal Corporate R&D as a polymer research engineer. He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from University of Delaware, and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University, focused on near-IR optical loss structure-property relationships in non-linear optical polymers.

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