2020 Volume 61 Issue 11 Pages 2041-2046
Materials play key roles to solve social problems. In order to accelerate materials research and development, it is crucial to use the power of cyberspace. This article overviews the concept and current status of Materials Integration (MI), a new concept that was proposed in the first-term Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) “Structural Materials for Innovation” and that has been centered in the second-term SIP “Materials Integration for Revolutionary Design System of Structural Materials.” The concept of MI is to computationally link the material four elements of process, structure, property, and performance for replacing experimental trials and errors in physical space by computational ones in cyberspace. The MI can be characterized by systems approaches and the deep use of data science. The first-term SIP demonstrated the proof of concept for some example problems by developing a computer system containing of computational modules and workflows connecting them. In the second-term SIP, the MI system has been further developed to solve inverse problems, i.e. to design materials and process from a target performance. Moreover, the target materials and processes are expanding to advanced ones used in aerospace and power generation industries as well. The article discusses the outlook of the MI-system based platform for accelerating materials innovation by academia-industry collaboration.
This Paper was Originally Published in Japanese in Materia Japan 58 (2019) 489–493.
