(10b) Materials Modeling - from the Molecule to the Final Product

Chemical & process companies cater to a wide range of industries such as aerospace, automotive and consumer products. Chemical products from the process industries need to satisfy the performance and safety requirements from their customers. This entails that the materials produced by the chemical industry needs to be tightly linked to the product requirements of their customers.

Designing a plane wing, a windmill turbine or a car bumper cannot overlook the impact of material choice on the final property of the part. Materials are getting more and more complex, and specific fine tuning is necessary to achieve the expected results. This is particularly important when it comes to polymers or composite materials as the variety of chemical modifications that can be performed on the row materials are basically limitless. This calls for a better integration of different field of science from chemistry to chemical engineering and processing and design, geometry or material science.

In this talk we will give a broad overview of the most recent applications of modeling, simulation and data science to predict the final mechanical properties of parts and products. Starting at the chemical level and going up the scales up to the processing of the part and its manufacturing. We will also present some of the tools that allow researchers and designer to do so and propose our vision on the "missing links" that should be the focus of researchers for the coming years to facilitate a full multiscale modeling of polymer and composite parts.