The potential for materials informatics in the development of non-conventional materials

Abstract The materials genome project has proposed that computational modeling and materials informatics should be combined with the more commonly used experimental methodologies to speed the development of new materials technologies. Unfortunately the ability of materials informatics to contribute depends upon the ready availability of large amounts of appropriate information assembled into databases. In addition, the nature of current physics based materials modeling and simulation techniques are limited to short length scale and short timescale phenomena and systems of limited complexity. Such circumstances would suggest that this approach would have little utility in the development of non-conventional materials. However, it is possible to assemble databases specifically designed for certain material types and material structure-property relationships If this is done with generally accepted procedures and widely available tools, the process of assembling relatively large microstructural databases could be “democratized” to the point that non-conventional materials practitioners all around the world could participate. In this way, a systematic approach could be used to address the variability in the structure and property relationships for locally sourced non-conventional materials. This chapter will briefly introduce materials informatics before proceeding with a discussion of how they could be applied to non-conventional materials using a community based approach. This will be facilitated with one example, the structure-properties relationships of bamboo.