SmaDi

Digitalisation of smart materials and their manufacturing processes

Material and associated technological innovations are a key driving force for innovative products. This applies in particular to so-called "smart materials". These have the distinct property of reacting to external influences (such as electrical, magnetic and thermal stimuli), e.g. through deformation. In the joint project, the subclasses of smart materials piezoelectric ceramics (PC), thermal and magnetic shape memory materials (SMA and MSMA) and dielectric elastomers (DE) were considered as examples. However, due to the complex material behavior, which depends on the manufacturing process, the targeted development of smart materials requires an exact description of the properties and the necessary manufacturing processes. The joint project focused on a digital representation of the materials and their manufacturing processes, which should enable an accelerated development of materials and process technologies on an industrial scale in order to gain advantages in international competition and take advantage of market opportunities. Ontological access to material parameters and transducer characteristics enables users to make a simplified comparison and supports their selection for their applications. From an information technology perspective, this requires the development of ontological artifacts with which access to material science findings, which are stored in data structures and models at different scale levels, can be designed uniformly and efficiently. In order to guarantee the practical usability of the ontological artifacts, they were developed on the basis of ontology-based data access (OBDA), which enables access to heterogeneous databases, among other things. This theoretically sound and industrially proven paradigm of information retrieval was extended in the research project by mathematical model equations for ontology-based data and model access (OBDMA).

SmaDi - Project runtime: 01.02.2021 – 30.06.2024