Digitalisation of material science – Improving product design in the context of Industry 4.0

Abstract

The pace of transition from prototyping to rapid manufacturing within the framework of Industry 4.0 has greatly increased. This increased rate of use of direct digital manufacturing to produce commercial products takes place within the backdrop of the major societal challenge of climate change. There is now an increased realization of the need to make wider use of sustainable materials in the manufacturing of products with a much -reduced carbon foot print.It is very challenging to develop a universal approach to the digitalization of Material Science given the broad range of materials in use and the realization that the properties and performance of a material not only critically depend on its chemical composition but also on the distribution of those atomic elements in the microstructure of the material and the texture of the microstructure. Although there are promising developments with simulations of metal alloys and polymers, there is no method which is available for such material optimization to be incorporated and automated in the work stream of direct digital manufacturing.This paper is focused on the development of a structure which enables the integration of the processes of material synthesis, characterization, material optimization, product design and fabrication into a single automated work flow. We introduce the concept of morphology or property optimization. We explore how we can use this approach to optimize the complete manufacturing process from synthesis to fabrication to yield high value products with new designs closely linked to the spatially resolved digital specification of the material. This structure will clearly enable the effective development of digital twins for the whole manufacturing cycle from raw materials selection, synthesis, characterization, product design and fabrication which we believe in the future will extend to the future life cycle and end of life processes of reuse and recycle.