Special Issue on “Digitalization in Materials Science and Engineering”

Advanced Materials and upcoming new ways of dealing with materials in product development and production will enable more sophisticated, higher performing, and more sustainable products. New materials solutions in innovative products require an intensive information and data exchange along the entire value chain. The availability of materials data along the value chain will not only enable performance optimization in the product but also increase materials and energy efficiency, enable cost reduction in product development and provide the basis for circularity and sustainable materials use. However, this requires a radical paradigm shift in the way how we deal with materials data and materials-related information. The data must be acquired, stored, and made available in such a way that it can be assessed and used by others.

The recent introduction of powerful, flexible modelling and simulation tools has already improved the design and production of innovative systems. The increasing digitalization of materials science, engineering and technology now affords a highly reliable, fast exchange of materials data between different players. But different knowledge areas and conventions or different length scales, for example, still hamper a smooth data exchange. Semantically structured data, common workflows and agreed-upon data management systems will significantly improve the exchange across these barriers and make materials-related data immediately available.

Particularly the academic community will greatly benefit from a flexible, structured data exchange. Researchers will be able to supply many different users with their results; the visibility, accessibility, and usability of research work will be significantly enhanced beyond just classical journal publications. Data fusion will make it possible to extract more information from data. Improved search tools will enable avoiding duplicate work, or to provide comparable results for plausibility checks.

From the industrial point of view immediate advantages are the reduction of costs and the speed-up of development processes. Materials, components, or product assessment will become more reliable and safer when based on wider data pools and based on actual data instead of mean or approximate values. Also, knowledge transfer between different sectors and staff generations will become more efficient.

Materials data will be interoperable and accessible, but it is also mandatory to guarantee the intellectual property and safety of materials data, particularly for industrial use. Furthermore, the introduction of digital product passports depends on a reliable, structured data in safe data spaces.

The relevance of materials data is addressed in different, nationwide programs. In the USA the Materials Genome Initiative (https://www.mgi.gov/) “was launched in 2011 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to help accelerate the design, discovery, development and deployment of advanced materials, and to reduce costs through the integration of advanced computation and data management with experimental synthesis and characterization.” In a review of its strategic orientation (http://nap.nationalacademies.org/26723), a committee recommended among other issues “the development of a national plan for a platform that creates interoperable systems that allow for comprehensive collection, dissemination, and use of computational and experimental data. Such an effort will also contribute to the global effort towards efficient and effective curation and maintenance of materials science data.” In Japan the materials platform DxMT (https://dxmt.mext.go.jp/en/) aims at “pioneering data-driven research methods that are completely different from conventional methods will be created for innovations in materials research.” The Materials Data Platform is a key element of this initiative (https://www.nims.go.jp/rnfs/en/materials-data-platform/index.html). It provides support for data-driven materials research, allowing creation, accumulation, and utilization of materials data.

In Germany the initiative to build a national research data infrastructure (German acronym NFDI) started in 2020 – “The vision of NFDI (https://www.nfdi.de/?lang=en) is data as a common good for excellent research, organised by the scientific community in Germany.” “The Vision of NFDI-MatWerk (https://nfdi-matwerk.de/) is to establish itself as the leading data infrastructure for Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), enabling seamless access to high-quality data and fostering a collaborative research environment.”

Complementarily to NFDI, the Initiative MaterialDigital was launched 2019 to bring together the emerging academic structures and industrial needs for materials data in a federated national structure. This Initiative comprises a central Platform MaterialDigital (https://www.material-digital.de/), which provides suitable tools and procedures for data management compatible to the FAIR principles.^[1] The domain specific aspects related to distinct materials systems, production chains and applications are extensively considered in joint projects, each of them working tightly connected to the Platform. In a first call 13 projects covering a broad spectrum were selected to develop the basic elements for such a structure (https://www.material-digital.de/projects/). This special issue presents the main results of these projects and some related work: