Perspective: Materials informatics across the product lifecycle: Selection, manufacturing, and certification

The process of taking a new material from invention to deployment can take 20 years or more. Since the announcement of the Materials Genome Initiative in 2011, new attention has been paid to accelerating this timeframe to address key challenges in industries from energy, to biomedical materials, to catalysis, to polymers, particularly in the development of new materials discovery techniques. Materials informatics, or algorithmically analyzing materials data at scale to gain novel insight, has been lauded as a path forward in this regard. An equal challenge to discovery, however, is the acceleration from discovery to market. In this paper, we address application of an informatics approach to materials selection, manufacturing, and qualification and identify key opportunities and challenges in each of these areas with a focus on reducing time to market for new advanced materials technologies.