Effective Materials Property Information Management for the 21st Century

Conference · Fri Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2010

OSTI ID:964704

Ren, Weiju ^[1]; Cebon, David ^[2]; Arnold, Steve ^[3]

---

1. ORNL
2. Cambridge University
3. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

This paper discusses key principles for the development of materials property information management software systems. There are growing needs for automated materials information management in industry, research organizations and government agencies. In part these are fuelled by the demands for higher efficiency in material testing, product design and development and engineering analysis. But equally important, organizations are being driven to employ sophisticated methods and software tools for managing their mission-critical materials information by the needs for consistency, quality and traceability of data, as well as control of access to proprietary or sensitive information. Furthermore the use of increasingly sophisticated nonlinear, anisotropic and multi-scale engineering analysis approaches, particularly for composite materials, requires both processing of much larger volumes of test data for development of constitutive models and much more complex materials data input requirements for Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software. And finally, the globalization of engineering processes and outsourcing of design and development activities generates much greater needs for sharing a single gold source of materials information between members of global engineering teams in extended supply-chains. Fortunately material property management systems have kept pace with the growing user demands. They have evolved from hard copy archives, through simple electronic databases, to versatile data management systems that can be customized to specific user needs. The more sophisticated of these provide facilities for: (i) data management functions such as access control, version control, and quality control; (ii) a wide range of data import, export and analysis capabilities; (iii) mechanisms for ensuring that all data is traceable to its pedigree sources: details of testing programs, published sources, etc; (iv) tools for searching, reporting and viewing the data; and (v) access to the information via a wide range of interfaces, including web browsers, rich clients, programmatic access and clients embedded in third-party applications, such as CAE systems. This paper discusses the important requirements for advanced material data management systems as well as the future challenges and opportunities such as automated error checking, automated data quality assessment and characterization, identification of gaps in data, as well as functionalities and business models to keep users returning to the source: to generate user demand to fuel database growth and maintenance.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Sponsoring Organization: NE USDOE - Office of Nuclear Energy
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 964704
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
BUSINESS
COMPOSITE MATERIALS
DESIGN
EFFICIENCY
EXPORTS
GLOBALIZATION
GOLD
MAINTENANCE
MANAGEMENT
PRESSURE VESSELS
PROCESSING
PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
QUALITY CONTROL
TESTING
database
management
materials