Industry 4.0 and ICME: The Evolution and Revolution of Materials Science and Engineering

Material science and engineering is a critical engineering discipline that supports the design, development, and realization of some of the world’s most complex and useful products. Material science and engineering has and continues to evolve from a completely empirical discipline of making, breaking, and analyzing to one of understanding of fundamental, underlying physics-based behavioral mechanisms which can be controlled and optimized to produce new and more advanced capabilities. Computational methods are leading to further integration of materials design and optimization within component and system design activities as envisioned by the various integrated computational materials engineering initiatives. Materials definitions are also advancing through the use of computational models and associated key chemical and structural parameters along with their accompanied variability for any given pedigree and their associated quality control system. Material descriptions are evolving toward model-based definitions that support the statistical-based material understanding and control. The establishment and linkage of materials and manufacturing process data capture, analysis, and curation with physics-based behavioral models is providing a path toward probabilistic material science and engineering. This is allowing for component location-specific properties rather than a simple, single empirically driven component minimum value. Revolutionary component design and structural analysis workflows are leading to the use of location-specific material property values with associated probabilities based on optimized manufacturing process paths and model-based material definitions.