About TiiMS

Purpose and focus

Director's welcome

Advisory board

Purpose and focus

The next revolution in air travel and space exploration depends on our ability to dramatically reduce mass, size and power consumption of aerospace vehicles while increasing reliability. The key is integrating intelligence and multifunctionality into the varied components of aerospace systems and vehicles.

The main focus of TiiMS is to develop and advance the nano and biotechnologies that enable our vision of adaptive, intelligent, shape-controllable micro and macro structures, for advanced aircraft and space systems. Revolutionary materials, structures and subsystems are sought to embody sensing, adaptability, self-monitoring, fault-tolerance, self-healing and autonomy to provide the functionality and intelligence for the needs of NASA aerospace missions.

While adaptive shape reconfigurability is the main TiiMS focus, future structures and materials must also incorporate

• Multifunctionality
• Self-healing
• Sensing
• Health-monitoring
• Fault tolerance and autonomy/intelligence

The technical scope for the institute focuses on basic research issues underlying the major theme of TiiMS –– the marriage of biotechnology with nanotechnology to enable the development of intelligent reconfigurable aerospace structures. The major technical challenge will be the merging of nano to macro scales, both at the modeling level as well as physical realization.

Five key research thrusts will be emphasized:

• Fabrication of functionalized nanomaterials with high strength-to-weight ratios and self-healing capabilities.
• Design of multifunctional material systems at nano, micro, meso and macro levels with appropriate methods developed to bridge the various length scales.
• Modeling the properties and characteristics of materials systems across the temporal and spatial scales
• Nanotechnologies for multifunctional proteins and biological and chemical sensors.
• Control of hierarchical adaptive systems with distributed intelligence at different length scales.

These research areas will be integrated from concept to implementation to provide the backbone for technology demonstration experiments. Two key structural systems will be used to demonstrate novel technologies: a morphing wing with controlled structural and flow reconfiguration and a multifunctional space structure.