Tierney himself began working at CCM as a graduate student. After completing his bachelor's degree at University College Galway in Ireland in 1994, he joined the Center as a research assistant on the RAPTECH Program, which focused on refining and automating the thermoplastic tow placement process. Tierney developed a series of process models for predicting material quality, residual stresses, and crystallization. A new software package, COMPROSOFT, was based on those models.

Tierney then extended his dissertation work to a new process known as RAIL (Rapid Automated Induction Lamination), developed jointly with the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and Alliant TechSystems. The RAIL manufacturing process is now an integral part of a production line that is the largest single consumer of thermoplastic prepreg.

COMPROSOFT has also been used to develop a process that replaces expensive palladium microcontacts with thermoplastic composites for Microcontacts, Inc. and is currently being used to develop a rapid consolidation process for metal-matrix composites. “This work planted the seed for the software tools,” says Tierney. “We went on to develop CCDS (Composite Cylinder Design Software), which was used to design the first successful composite overwrap gun barrel for the US Army. The part was made by Benét Laboratories and Spencer Composites and successfully tested at ARL in 2003.”

Tierney gradually became involved with upgrading older CCM software packages—programs that encapsulated valuable knowledge but were not always easy to use, including CMAP (Composite Materials Analysis of Plates), PIRSA (Process-Induced Residual Stress Analysis), and LAM3D (3D Laminated Media Analysis).

These programs are now all incorporated in a suite of powerful software tools known collectively as Composite Design Software, or CDS. The package also includes a Materials Database Management Software program (CDS-MAT).

“CDS-MAT tracks material properties, sources, units, and history,” Tierney explains, “and acts as a sort of central depository for materials. Further, it has been integrated with all of the other CDS applications and can export data to third-party applications such as ANSYS and ABAQUS.”

CDS is now available to all CCM researchers, the Army, and the Center's industrial consortium members. The programs can be downloaded from the Internet via a password-protected site. “During the past few years, we've gone from a cumbersome UNIX-based platform to a PC-based graphical user interface with real-time design capabilities,” Tierney says.

Travis Bogetti , an ARL researcher in residence at CCM, offers high praise for Tierney's accomplishments. “The early composites software at CCM was useful but not necessarily usable ,” he says. “John has done more than just make these codes user-friendly—he's created a methodology for doing so that can be applied to any existing or new program. He has a very unique skill, being able to design a GUI for any code to make it simple and useful. He's also linked the software programs to each other, which adds tremendous value by elucidating interrelationships and making the entire system more robust.”

“These software tools have enabled more rapid evaluation and design and have made people's daily jobs easier,” Bogetti continues. “Within the past year, the codes have been very instrumental in enabling us to design composite structures for a variety of applications.”

CDS is used not only by industry and government for commercial and military applications but also by academia for teaching purposes.

And for the future? Tierney says that the software tools are continually being improved and expanded to reflect the latest research findings and to ensure that the needs of CCM's collaborators are being met.

But beyond expanding the number of components in the software suite, Tierney is excited about the potential of the entire package to enable new frontiers in material design.

“The software enables us to see the effects of design changes in real time,” he says. “With this instant feedback, we can experiment to see how a structure will change in response to small changes in microstructure. Ultimately, this will enable us to design at the molecular level, creating materials designed for specific functions. The possibilities are infinite.”

“John is establishing a comprehensive multi-scale modeling capability for current and future multifunctional materials that will bridge materials from the nanoscale to full size structures,” says CCM Director Jack Gillespie. “We feel this capability is one key to the accelerated insertion of new materials and captures our ‘materials by design' philosophy.