The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to create a data-driven electronic infrastructure for rapidly developing new advanced materials. Advanced materials are crucial to a $100 billion cross-section of the American economy, from clean energy (catalysts, batteries, solar cells), to aerospace & defense (heat shields, armor), to automotive (lightweight alloys), to electronics (semiconductors, LEDs). Unfortunately, inventing better materials is very challenging?the process can take 10-20 years?and a key part of the problem is a lack of consolidated, searchable, analytics-friendly materials databases that can inform research efforts. This project will build an advanced database of catalyst materials and their properties, which will allow for the use of the same data-driven strategy to accelerate the pace of innovation in many other materials applications. This project can immediately strengthen the United States? competitive position in research and manufacturing in the $14 billion global catalyst market, and position the nation for a future information technology advantage in other materials-related industries.
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses a critical technical problem plaguing the materials industry at large: a lack of comprehensive databases of materials and their properties. Without access to such data, the materials industry cannot systematically exploit trends in those data to invent next-generation materials. This particular project focuses on catalyst materials, but will be readily extensible to other areas of materials development in the future. Cost-effectively collecting, storing, and searching data on tens of thousands of materials is a major technical challenge, which this project plans to address by developing cutting-edge text mining algorithms and database infrastructure. Such technologies, if successful, will enable rapid harvesting and aggregation of materials data from text, tables, and smaller databases. These technologies could be readily applied to build out materials property databases in many other areas beyond catalysis, and thereby fuel the materials industry with an enormous infusion of data.
During our Phase I SBIR Project, we focused on laying the groundwork for a system that stores diverse materials data and provides users a means to explore and engage with the available data. The platform can be accessed at www.citrination.com. On this platform, we are able to store a variety of materials data: fundamental materials properties, processing history, multidimensional data, binary data (e.g., images), and any other data that a user might want to include. In addition, we have enabled basic semantic searching. This database is called Citrination. Citrination provides a simple interface to search for materials and properties. A link is provided to an online source for each property in the database. Two-dimensional data is displayed on a plot that is generated automatically for any two-dimensional data set. Access to the site will be free for all academic use. This site will enable the analysis and extrapolation of materials data at a scale never before seen. Our goal, and early evidence supports that this can happen, is that the CItrination platform can become a primary repository of materials data for publicly available (and private) research data and instigate a new conversation around scientific data and enable the efficient exploration of new undiscovered materials space.
