World of Pure Imagination

On the Rise of Materials Informatics

We have enjoyed a century of innovation and productivity since Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company developed the moving assembly line manufacturing process over the years of 1908 to 1915. While originally proposed by Adam Smith in his work The Wealth of Nations published in 1776, Ford popularized the method of progressive assembly in which interchangeable parts and laborers constructed a product using a sequential process that had been optimized for efficiency. Total per car assembly time for the venerable Model-T was reduced from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes in a dynamic production line that generated a finished automobile every 3 minutes. While amazingly efficient, Ford’s assembly line was also amazingly inflexible. “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” is a famous stance recalled by Ford in his autobiography — efficiency and optimization did not easily accommodate customization and innovation.

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Alfred P. Sloan addressed this deficiency as President and later Chairman of the Board of General Motors from 1923–1956. He separated the production line into divisions such as engine, powertrain, and body and charged them with incorporating annual styling changes into GM’s assembly line in a process that evolved into the concept of “planned obsolescence”, an approach that designs a product with a limited useful life or style. This method infused customization and innovation into upcoming model years; however, it still took several years to research, develop, and retool the assembly line in a process that pushed the model year currently under study several years into the future.

French-born engineer, François J. Castaing, moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1980 as a result of the acquisition of Renault S.A. by the American Motors Corporation (AMC) where he served as Vice President of Engineering and Group Vice President of Product and Quality until 1987. During that time Castaing modified Sloan’s divisional structure to include the development of engineering teams that focused on a single type of car platform and were charged with the development of new models from concept to production. The 1980s also saw the rise of Computer-Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) software that permitted these teams to experiment with new designs in software, obviating the need to build scale prototypes for each proposed design modification. Castaing is credited with the modern-day success of the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) and after the acquisition of AMC by Chrysler in 1987, his design teams were credited with development of the LH-platform used by the Eagle Vision, Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde, LHS, and New Yorker, all of which could be designed from concept to production in 39 months instead of the normal 50 months required by traditional divisional design approaches.

This progression, from Ford, through Sloan, to Castaing continues today. Large, complex systems are broken down into smaller, more manageable components that permit rapid development and experimentation. As components continue to shrink in scope and size, statistical information of system variables is replaced by volumes of information that is specific to individual parts and materials, ultimately arriving at details on the level of atoms and molecules. The rise of material informatics is experiencing challenges and opportunities similar to those arising from the development of medical-, chemo-, and bioinformatics.

June 2011 saw the creation of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) by the National Science and Technology council. Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology introduces the initiative by writing:

“In much the same way that silicon in the 1970s led to the modern information technology industry, the development of advanced materials will fuel many of the emerging industries that will address challenges in energy, national security, healthcare, and other areas. Yet the time it takes to move a newly discovered advanced material from the laboratory to the commercial market place remains far too long. Accelerating this process could significantly improve U.S. global competitiveness and ensure that the Nation remains at the forefront of the advanced materials marketplace. This Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness aims to reduce development time by providing the infrastructure and training that American innovators need to discover, develop, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials in a more expeditious and economical way.”

At its heart, the MGI seeks the development of a “new integrated design continuum that incorporates the greater use of computing and information technologies coupled with advances in characterization and experiment” and seeks to shorten the materials development cycle from its current 10–20 years to 2 or 3 years. The MGI suggests an approach that includes:

1. The development, maintenance, and deployment of reliable, interoperable, and reusable software for the next-generation design of matter that is coordinated by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
2. The development of next-generation characterization tools that provide the fundamental basis for development of and validation of the algorithms and software tools, similar to the Human Genome Project.
3. The creation of an Advanced Materials by Design program led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that will target the development of standards infrastructure, reference databases (similar to Genbank), and centers of excellence that will enable reliable computer modeling and simulation for materials discovery and optimization.
4. Increased research by the Department of Defense (DOD) in basic and applied computational materials research directed toward enhancing performance and accelerating transition of advanced materials to meet national security needs.
5. The increased use of computational tools by the DOE’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Next-Generation Materials program in the manufacture and characterization of new materials for energy technologies.
6. The facilitation by NSF and DOD of new partnerships between relevant science and engineering communities in academia, government, and industry to promote this initiative and engage with students and colleagues to develop the culture and relevant training of the next-generation workforce.

While a similar progression evolved over a century in automobile manufacturing, the Human Genome Project was accomplished in the 10 years between 1990–2000. Leveraging the lessons learned in these two examples and the continued advancement in software and computing technology, the rise of materials informatics may be a rapid one.

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This material originally appeared as a Contributed Editorial in Scientific Computing, June 2012, pg. 8.

William L. Weaver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Science, Business, and Technology at La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA USA. He holds a B.S. Degree with Double Majors in Chemistry and Physics and earned his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry with expertise in Ultrafast LASER Spectroscopy. He teaches, writes, and speaks on the application of Systems Thinking to the development of New Products and Innovation.