QuesTek’s ICMD materials design and engineering SaaS now commercially available
July 28, 2023
QuesTek Innovations LLC, Evanston, Illinois, USA, has officially launched its ICMD® – Integrated Computational Materials Design – digital platform for materials engineering, qualification and certification. This platform has been available to certain organisations for over a year, Questek now offers the cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) to a wide variety of organisations with an interest in enabling the digital transformation of materials engineering and the materials value chain.
“Revolutionary products are increasingly the result of materials concurrency — the simultaneous development of high-performance products and novel materials that enable them,” stated Jason Sebastian, president, QuesTek. “ICMD facilitates and streamlines this practice like never before.”
ICMD is built on computational physics models derived from hundreds of materials science engagements QuesTek has completed on behalf of clients such as NASA, SpaceX, Apple, GM, Boeing and Audi since 1997. The software also uses machine learning when beneficial to solve a particular materials challenge.
“Some of the most innovative organisations in the world have been exercising ICMD over the past year,” added Bill Mahoney, QuesTek COO. “We’ve found that in addition to designing novel materials to enable greater performance, clients can use the breadth of toolkits in the platform to benefit a range of materials processes, such as using the qualifications toolkit within ICMD to dramatically speed up the process of testing and certifying materials.”
In a recent example, QuesTek announced a partnership with Norsk Titanium to advance the development of nickel alloy wire in Directed Energy Deposition (DED) Additive Manufacturing. This development effort provides manufacturers an alternative to casting for large aerospace and industrial components, bypassing significant supply chain delays and shortening long lead times.
QuesTek states that ICMD can shave years off the timeline of qualifying new materials in industries such as medical devices, where materials innovation is increasingly an effective means to advance performance and differentiate products. The software is also intended to act as a tool to help OEMs and suppliers meet sustainability targets through lightweighting and developing alloys with greener compositions that exclude or minimise rare earth elements.
“QuesTek will continue to provide materials consulting and service engagements for commercial and government clients,” Sebastian concluded. “ICMD allows a broader range of offerings for QuesTek. Organisations that wish to use the technology independently may do so, and our team can also provide whatever level of support or collaboration is needed. ICMD dramatically increases the reach and impact of QuesTek’s expertise while bringing greater scale to our mission to drive innovation through materials science.”
Interested in learning more about Questek’s ICMD? Read all about the software’s development journey and process details in the Winter 2022 edition of Metal Additive Manufacturing magazine. Available to read as a PDF or online.
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