Capitalizing on Heterogeneity and Anisotropy to Design Desirable Hardware That is Difficult to Reverse Engineer

Abstract

This paper presents a method for treating material microstructure (crystallographic grain size, orientation, and distribution) as design variables that can be manipulated—for common or exotic materials—to identify the unusual material properties and to design devices that are difficult to reverse engineer. A practical approach, carefully tied to proven manufacturing strategies, is used to tailor the material microstructures by strategically orienting and laminating thin anisotropic metallic sheets. The approach, coupled with numerical optimization, manipulates the material microstructures to obtain the desired material properties at designer-specified locations (heterogeneously) or across the entire part (homogeneously). A comparative study is provided, which examines various microstructures for a simple fixed geometry. These cases show how the proposed approach can provide hardware with enhanced mechanical performance in a way that is disguised within the microscopic features of the material microstructure.