Accelerating the discovery and commercialization of novel materials is necessary for maintaining economic competitiveness and timely addressing many societal issues (e.g., sustainable manufacturing and clean energy). For several decades now, simulations have complemented empirical science for such acceleration, culminating in several successful industrial applications of this approach, termed integrated computational materials engineering (ICME). In 2011, the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) sought to apply this idea at scale across all materials industries, including a third “digital data” pillar. Materials informatics is the practical manifestation of “digital data” methods to materials science problems, including: (1) the collection, generation, and distribution of materials data, (2) the use of that data to train machine learning models for predicting process-structure-property relationships, and (3) the design of experiments using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms based on those models.
Citrine Informatics is a software company building a scalable, enterprise-level materials informatics platform for data-driven materials and chemicals development. The Citrine Platform combines smart materials data infrastructure and AI, which accelerates development of cutting-edge materials, facilitates product portfolio optimization, and codifies research IP, enabling its reuse and preventing its loss. Citrine's customers include Panasonic, Michelin, LANXESS, and others in the materials, chemicals, and product manufacturing industries.
In this talk, the concepts around materials informatics will be introduced, Citrine’s software will be described, and several case studies demonstrating the value of materials informatics will be discussed.