Itochu Techno-Solutions (CTC) announced that it has provided the cloud-based material development platform ‘ICMD’ to Daido Steel through their joint venture company QuesTek Japan (headquartered in Minato, Tokyo). QuesTek Japan is CTC’s joint venture company in partnership with QuesTek International (headquartered in Illinois, US), which has highly sophisticated technologies related to material development. This is the first time that a company has implemented ICMD.
ICMD is the abbreviation of ‘Integrated Computational Materials Design’. Wide-ranged testing of ICMD had been carried out with such clients as SpaceX and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which conducted early evaluations of the platform. The platform has begun to be provided by QuesTek from July.
ICMD is adept at handling material modeling and design simulations, and it can be utilized for such purposes as shortening the time needed for developing high performance special steels and improving the consistency of the quality of the steels during production. The platform is packaged with unique material models and process optimization/characteristic evaluation tools, and it is capable of developing materials that meet performance requirements and conducting evaluations of those materials while using minimal amounts of data. These capabilities expand the possibilities of material design, and they also lead to reducing the time needed for selecting candidate materials.
QuesTek Japan was established as a joint venture business in February 2020 by combining QuesTek’s material development technology business with CTC’s simulation technology business. The joint venture company has been providing material design services and conducting sales of alloy licenses. Sales of ICMD has begun from September, and QuesTek Japan itself provides a material design service utilizing ICMD.
Daido Steel implemented ICMD in November. QuesTek Japan handled establishing the necessary environment for the platform and also provided training, while CTC handled the installation of an integrated thermodynamic calculation software used for supporting simulations. CTC and QuesTek Japan see the adoption of ICMD by Daido Steel as an opportunity to make proposals to other customers in the Japanese market to further increase adoptions of ICMD.
