Virtual Material Testing to Develop and Optimize New Composite Materials

Product development and design based on data science has been attracting the attention of many industries recently. It is also being adopted by the materials industry in an emerging field called ‘materials informatics’ or ‘data-driven design’.

This approach requires a large amount of materials data in an appropriate database to sufficiently train artificial intelligence. Composite materials, however, do not have sufficiently large material databases. Therefore, it is necessary to collect this information through physical material testing. Yet, it is not realistic in terms of time and cost to complete the preparation process required for physical material testing. Virtual material testing using FEM (Finite Element Modelling) has a great potential to solve these problems. This article describes a virtual material testing technique based on the homogenization method and its capabilities for coupling with material databases.