Four Transformative Trends in Materials Science and Engineering
“Traditionally, developing new materials has been a slow, painstaking process. To find the properties they're looking for, researchers would often have to test hundreds--or even thousands--of materials one by one. That made materials research prohibitively expensive for most industries.
Yet today, we're in the midst of a materials revolution. Scientists are using powerful simulation techniques, as well as sophisticated machine learning algorithms, to propel innovation forward at blazing speed and even point them toward possibilities they had never considered. Over the next decade, the rapid advancement in materials will have a massive impact.” –Inc. Magazine Report
Advancements in materials science and engineering are emerging and maturing at a faster pace than ever before. From plastics-based lightweighting to nanometer-scale semiconductor structures, materials innovations are opening up new possibilities (and creating substantial disruptions) in just about every industry on earth. In this blog, we explain some key trends driving this rapid pace of innovation, and what manufacturers are doing to keep up.
Continuous Materials Innovation is Creating New Challenges and Opportunities
As industries continue to push the boundaries of what materials can do, new challenges will emerge alongside new opportunities. From design engineering groups to quality testing laboratories, organizations must keep up with a breakneck pace of innovation, new demands for sustainability, and rapidly evolving supply chains. Doing so successfully requires a cross-functional effort to find the right balance of performance, cost, and sustainability, while keeping abreast of all relevant quality and safety standards.
Below, we explore five key trends demonstrating the rapid pace of change in materials science, how manufacturers are responding, and how the right capabilities can help organizations adapt.
Trend One: New High-Performance Materials Drive Disruption Across Industries
High-performance, precision-engineered polymers provide an instructive example of how new materials with unprecedented performance characteristics can drive waves of disruption across multiple industries.
These materials allow lightweight plastics to thrive in applications once relegated to metals (such as automotive and aerospace components). Precision-engineered filtration membranes leverage plastics to solve critical challenges in medical devices, and 3D printing provides unprecedented prototyping and rapid manufacturing capabilities across a growing range of applications. For a deeper discussion of major trends in the plastic industry, please see our white paper here.
This explosion of new applications creates new strategic dynamics for various market participants:
- OEM component manufacturers who employ traditional materials will face pressure to rapidly advance their own materials’ performance to stay competitive.
- Plastic makers need to quickly iterate new materials in order to stay competitive, requiring timely design, development, and testing/verification of materials for new applications.
- Product manufacturers need the ability to quickly adapt designs, supply chains, quality testing capabilities, and production lines to new materials as they come to market.
To keep up, all of these market participants will need to respond proactively, investing in research and development, employing more agile supply chain management practices, and deploying more rapid and flexible materials and component testing technologies. While the growth of performance plastics is a particularly dramatic example, these same dynamics play out in any industry defined by rapid materials innovation.
Trend Two: An Imperative for Sustainability Will Drive New Ways of Thinking About Material Capabilities
Deloitte notes that “Sustainable manufacturing—the production of goods through economically-sound processes that minimize environmental impact—will most likely require the transformation of the entire manufacturing and industrial system. Manufacturers will need to look at how they design, source, manufacture, deliver, and service all their products. It’s a daunting proposition. But it’s one manufacturers need to address as the sustainability imperative continues to grow.”
Faced with pressure from regulators and customers alike, manufacturers will increasingly need to account for sustainability when designing and sourcing products. They will need to evaluate the environmental impact of all materials used in their products, including their full lifecycle costs.
Once these costs are understood, many products will face an imperative to explore alternative materials sources that can continue to deliver the requisite performance characteristics while offering improved sustainability. Alternatives may include recycled materials, materials with sustainable options for end-of-life disposal (e.g. biodegradable), or simply materials sourced from suppliers who are able to provide superior traceability and carbon mitigation.
Whatever the ultimate solution for a given component or product, new concerns for sustainability will be another critical driver of new R&D investments, testing capabilities, and sourcing strategies for years to come.
Trend Three: Complex Materials Require Novel Manufacturing and Testing Techniques
In many applications, the use of a single material may not be sufficient to meet the desired performance requirements. Consequently, one of the defining trends of the current wave of materials innovation is complex materials such as composites, nanomaterials, and raw materials for additive manufacturing.
Manufacturers will need to develop a deeper understanding of how to manufacture new, multi-material compounds, including managing the complex properties that arise from their constituent material interfaces. Testing these complex materials will require innovative equipment and methods. In addition to employing more flexible testing equipment that can accommodate a wide variety of materials, manufacturers will increasingly need to investigate novel techniques such as multiscale modeling and advanced imaging techniques.
Trend Four: Simulation-Based Modeling is Accelerating Development and Adoption of New Materials
A combination of advancements in machine learning and data analytics (along with dramatically reduced costs for the computing power needed to run them) is opening up new computational approaches in materials science and engineering, which draw on simulations and modeling to predict material properties. These methods will become an increasingly central pillar for manufacturers across many different industries.
These digital approaches allow for the investigation of a huge range of material compositions, formulations, and structures, at a scale that would have been time- and cost-prohibitive in even the recent past. Adopting these techniques can help manufacturers iterate faster, further accelerating the development and optimization of new materials with precisely targeted properties.
But it is important to recognize that physical materials and component testing still play a key role when developing simulated models. When working with simulated models, the results will only be as good as the data underlying the model’s assumptions.
How Automated Materials Testing Capabilities Can Help Keep Pace with Materials Innovation
As a leading provider of testing solutions used in both R&D and quality assurance testing in over 20 different industries, ZwickRoell has extensive hands-on experience helping manufacturers adapt to new business requirements with highly flexible automated testing systems. These solutions can play a key role in helping manufacturing facilities, quality testing labs, and R&D groups align their testing capabilities to each of the trends discussed above.
- Flexible automated testing systems are essential for verifying the properties of new high-performance materials without delays or extensive capital investments in new machinery.
- Robust testing capabilities will also be critical for identifying which sustainable materials can fulfill vital form, fit, and function requirements.
- Complex materials benefit from the ability to integrate multiple types of tests into a single automated solution.
- Highly accurate test results will be a vital foundation for the refinement of simulation-based models.
Or, if you have questions about how our testing solutions can help keep up with an unprecedented pace of materials innovation, we encourage you to reach out to our team using the button below.