History

The CMSL group is the natural evolution of the of the Composite Materials and Structures Group in its effort the face the realities of composites beyond physical space and materials into the conceptual and computational spaces. The idea of data-driven systemic behavior prediction of complex systems contains the ideas of composite materials behavior prediction as well as Electromagnetic Launcher systems and other systems in general. As the thirst for automating higher abstraction has motivated us for a long time we have decided to make this apparent on the current name of the group. CMSL is currently a section of the Center of Computational Materials Sciences Code 6390, while just prior to that was a part of the Special Projects Group, Code 6303 of the Materials Science and Technology Division of NRL-DC under the name of Composite Material Systems (CMS).

Prior to that, the CMS group was an outgrowth of the Composite Materials effort of the old Mechanics of Materials Branch (Code 6380) at NRL. The personnel of the Structures Criteria Section (Code 6383) in that branch, constituted the core of the CMS group. The rest of the Code 6380 personnel formed the Multifunctional Materials Branch (Code 6350). The mechanics of materials branch was the successor of the Dr. George Irwin's and Dr. Joe Kies' organizations that originated the discipline of "Fracture Mechanics".

Functional Uniqueness

NRL has been the birthplace of many advances in science and technology. Our group is responsible for the only automated methodology that experimentally determines the full constitutive behavior of fiber reinforced Polymer Matrix Composites both in the linear and non-linear regimes. This is achieved with the aid of custom developed automated testing machines, and by custom developed processes of data reduction, modeling and analysis. Recently, we have been working on automating the process of generating custom data-driven simulation environments that provide access to the measured behavior of materials and structures in terms of multidimensional multiparametric spaces.