(National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Aviation Administration) This report was written to address the U.S. aviation industry’s need to increase the efficiency of qualification and certification (Q&C) of process-intensive aviation components through the maturation and adoption of computational materials (CM) methods. A key challenge in the introduction of these CM approaches is overcoming the valley of death, where promising low-TRL CM-based Q&C technologies struggle to progress toward industry deployment. Despite the inherent promise of CM capabilities, their application has been primarily limited to the early phases of the product development cycle due to insufficient trust in CM outputs, fragmented industry adoption, regulatory acceptance, and a lack of standardized frameworks for integrating computational methods into established Q&C practices. As the pace of technological advancement accelerates globally, increasing the speed and reducing the cost of innovation are critical to ensuring that U.S. industry remains competitive and can rapidly adopt new materials and manufacturing processes. By outlining industry needs, regulatory considerations, key software capabilities, validation strategies, uncertainty quantification, and the current state of computational methods and practices, this report provides a roadmap for building confidence in CM tools and integrating them into Q&C frameworks. It also introduces a simulation maturity framework and maturation pathways within a broader CM ecosystem, concluding with recommended next steps to drive progress in this critical domain.
