ICMD Expands Capabilities with New Fatigue Toolkit

QuesTek Innovations announces expansion of the ICMD materials design and engineering platform with a Fatigue Toolkit developed to enable users to predict fatigue life as a function of material, microstructure and loading scenario. This enhanced feature of the ICMD platform enhances fatigue analysis, leveraging mechanistic, physics-based modeling, the company says.

This approach to modeling minimum fatigue life can be combined with limited testing using the Accelerated Insertion of Materials (AIM) methodology within ICMD to save n testing costs vs traditional full design of experiments approaches for qualification of fatigue critical materials.

ICMD's Fatigue Toolkit combines physics-based simulations with microstructure and defect digital twins, enabling engineers to improve safety, reduce costs, and make data-driven decisions for material selection, design, and deployment, the company says.

The ICMD Fatigue Toolkit introduces microstructure-sensitive fatigue modeling, using crystal plasticity simulations, to enable engineers to predict crack formation and microstructurally small crack growth phases, notably for high-cycle fatigue applications. 

Fatigue Toolkit Key Features

• 3D Digital Microstructure Generation—Statistical digital twin of grain size, orientation, morphology, inclusions, and porosity.
• Material Model Calibration—Uses cyclic stress-strain data to enable custom calibration of plasticity models.
• Customizable Loading Scenarios—Supports varied multi-axial or uniaxial strain states, strain ratios, and fatigue cycles.
• Multi-Stage Fatigue Prediction—Tracks fatigue life from crack incubation to long crack growth predicting full fatigue life in high and low cycle fatigue.
• Streamlined CPFEM Integration—Enables computationally efficient, physics-based fatigue simulations.
• Component-Scale Fatigue Analysis—Integrates with finite element simulations for real-world fatigue predictions.

Integration with Alloy Design Toolkit

The toolkit expands ICMD's capabilities beyond static property analysis, enabling fatigue life prediction directly from alloy composition and processing parameters. It includes validated models for key engineering alloys such as nickel-based superalloys (e.g., IN625, IN100), titanium alloys (e.g., Ti64), high-strength aluminum (e.g., AA7075-T6), and martensitic steels (e.g., Ferrium C64).

About QuesTek

QuesTek is a provider that helps customers execute the full cycle from novel design to production, certification, and flight operations with proprietary materials.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.