The United States Air Force has set up a new research center at John Hopkins to carry out research on advanced materials design for aerospace applications.
The center will be known as The Center of Excellence on Integrated Material Modeling, CEIMM and will engineer innovative experimental and simulation methods to aid in the development of next generation defense aircraft. The scope of the materials research is within a digital framework.
The CEIMM will be located at the Homewood campus of John Hopkins and will employ a national multidisciplinary research team selected from the military, academia and industry. Some of the universities participating in the program are the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The U.S. Air Force will support the center with a grant of US $3 million to be disbursed over a three-year period. The researchers will work on the development of innovative models and experimental methods that can be universally applied to various categories of structural materials. The research methodology will first entail the study of atomic scale and structural scale properties of existing materials and subsequently develop new materials for use in aerospace applications. The ultimate objective of the program is to engineer robust and lightweight components for next generation defense aircraft.
The center will operate within the premises of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, HEMI inaugurated in early 2012. The infrastructure and staff will be partly shared between the HEMI and CEIMM. Both the entities will move to a new 56,000-square-foot facility by 2014.