Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Further reductions in the weight of transportation vehicles such as airplanes, automobiles, and ships are required to achieve an international carbon-neutral society. To meet these social demands, there is a growing interest in additive manufacturing (AM) technologies such as 3D printing and the appropriate use of multi-material combinations to achieve a lightweight structure. To ensure the safe and reliable use of materials produced by these new manufacturing methods, it is essential to evaluate whether the materials contain crack-like defects or voids that are within acceptable dimensional limits. However, it is challenging to detect internal defects in the materials with "complex shapes," "mechanical anisotropy," and "heterogeneous material interfaces" produced by AM and multi-material technologies using current ultrasound inspection methods or radiographic techniques. The objective of this research is for a team of three researchers specializing in different fields, namely, material science (Go Yamamoto, Department of Aerospace Engineering), interface science (Takashi Ito, The Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences), and computational science (Gota Kikukawa, Institute of Fluid Science), to collaborate and develop a novel defect inspection method using topology optimization.