Pinar Acar has won $40,000 in seed funding from the Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science. The funds serve as startup funds to support the collection of initial data that will become the basis of applications for larger external grants, and require an interdisciplinary partnership with another faculty member.

Acar's project, Physics-Based and Data-Driven Thermo-Mechanical Modeling of Additively Manufactured Metallic Alloys, includes the work of Rakesh Kapania, a professor in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. To improve the mechanical properties of useful aerospace-grade titanium-aluminum alloys, Acar and Kapania will use machine learning to explore how the microstructure of these materials and the parameters used to 3D-print them affect their performance.