Strategies to accelerate the design, discovery, development and deployment of materials in the era of the digital transformation

Kurzfassung

Traditional approaches to deploy new structural alloys require development cycles that can easily take a decade and are associated with significant economic risks. This is incompatible with current challenges such as global warming, scarcity of raw materials and rising energy costs, which are forcing humankind to rapidly develop sustainable solutions if the level of prosperity of future generations is to be, at least, maintained. To this purpose, innovative and efficient materials solutions along the entire value chain are an essential key. In this presentation, we will show how the digital transformation is enabling the acceleration of the design, discovery, development and deployment of new alloys for the transportation industry (land, air and space). The combination of artificial intelligence, robotic-based labs, high-throughput data generation/analysis, materials combinatorics, predictive simulations, collaborative virtual environments and multi-scale time-resolved experiments result in a suite of data-centric tools whose capabilities will be highlighted through specific use cases: the design of recycled-based alloys, the autonomous testing of metallic structures, the operando study of materials during 3D printing, and the rapid analysis of large experimental datasets. The overall aim is to demonstrate the transformative potential of data-centric approaches to shorten materials development cycles across a range of industrial sectors.