PREFACE: REVOLUTIONIZING ENGINEERING PRACTICE BYMULTISCALE METHODS

Accelerated adoption of multiscale technologies, or any technology for that matter, depends not only on the successes of individual organizations that promote them but rather on their broader acceptance as a technology of choice. Precisely for this reason, on January 4, 2021, a number of leading commercial software vendors were invited to showcase the progress they made in developing transformational multiscale technologies and to report the impact their multiscale technologies have made on Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME). Several software vendors including Dassault Systemes SIMULIA, HEXAGON MSC, Altair, Siemens, and NASA Glenn accepted this challenge. The special issue entitled “Revolutionizing Engineering Practice by Multiscale Methods,” organized by the International Journal for Multiscale Computational Engineering, provides the platform for these contributions. Since the special issue contributors were not requested to follow any specific manuscript outline or its length, various manuscripts have different flavor, scope, and focus. In the following, I provide a self-imposed six-line summary of various contributions in coordination with individual article writers. Dassault Systemes SIMULIA’s article (Bi et al., 2021) focuses on both the breadth and depth of their multiscale capabilities. SIMULIAmultiscale capabilities comprise a broad range of scales ranging from the quantum scale all the way to the product scale and for multiple, often coupled, physical processes that include solids, fluids, electromagnetics, thermal, and controls. These capabilities are housed in three Dassault Systemes products, CATIA for product design, SIMULIA for simulation for design, and BIOVIA for computational chemistry and materials science, all of which are integrated in a single business environment, the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. The article of MSC Software (part of Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence) (Doghri et al., 2021), and its center of excellence focusing on materials (formerly e-Xstream engineering), overviews the Digimat software platform including its theoretical background and applications in materials engineering, virtual testing, process engineering, and structural engineering, for various materials and manufacturing processes including additive manufacturing. The primary objective is to present the key concepts behind multiscale-grounded ICME and illustrate that it achieved a level of maturity which enabled it to make the transition from academic research to predictive engineering design. Altair’s article (Wollschlager et al., 2021) focuses on the technical overview of Multiscale Designer, which houses its multiscale capabilities. Multiscale Designer is employed for the development of multiscale material models for various heterogeneous anisotropic material including, but not limited to, continuous and chopped fibrous composites, honeycomb cores, lattice structures, reinforced concrete, soil, etc. Multiscale Designer offers user material plug-ins to commercial finite element solvers; Altair’s OptiStruct & Radioss, Abaqus, Ansys, and LS-Dyna. Applications include structural design, ultimate load assessment, material allowables, creep, fracture, and impact. Siemens’ article (Song et al., 2021) focuses on the applications of the Simcenter Multimech multiscale material modeling and simulation platform based on the FE 2 multiscale approach. The first application focuses on virtual testing of fiber reinforced composites for the purpose of expediting material development. The second application studies crack initiation and propagation due to thermal and mechanical effects of C/C-SiC material, where cracks in the matrix material or in the fiber/matrix interface can be modeled explicitly. The third application utilizes multiscale modeling in the research of advanced nanomaterials. NASA Glenn’s article (Pineda et al., 2021) focuses on an overview of the NASA Multiscale Analysis Tool (NASMAT) software platform for multiscale modeling of composites for engineering applications. NASMAT performs analysis of materials with any arbitrary number of length scales through the use of recursive procedures and data structures and also can function as an effective material model within structural finite element models. NASMAT is