The Materials Development for Platforms (MDP) program aims to develop a methodology and toolset to compress the applied material development sequence from 10+ years to roughly 2.5 years. Applied material development will be conducted by: (a) establishing a cross-disciplinary construct that incorporates materials science, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME), engineering, design, analysis, and manufacturing; and (b) establishing and implementing a new materials development methodology that is guided by "design intent" and incorporates manufacturing technology. The materials development efforts in MDP will be applied to a hypersonic boost-glide hot structure aeroshell use case. Rapid assessment, optimization, and maturation of material systems and designs that meet platform design intent and manufacturability requirements will be conducted. Fabricated sub-elements will be tested in Government-established testbed(s), and the MDP materials development methodology will be assessed. The MDP program will be arranged into the following four separate Technical Areas (TAs):

o TA1: Engineering, Design, Analysis, and Iterative Material/Structure Characterization
o TA2: Materials and Processing Science, Manufacturing, and Materials Modeling
o TA3: Informatics, Analytics, Data Fusion, and Data Mining
o TA4: Metrology for Screening Hypersonic Materials

The motivation for the separate TAs is to develop and demonstrate the capability to have different designers, materials scientists and engineers, and manufacturing engineers from different organizations work collectively to meet the MDP objectives.

See attached DARPA-BAA-14-52.

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