(398bu) Composelector: An European H2020 Project for Integrating Multi-Scale Material Simulation and Industrial Business Decisions

The mission of the recently launched European H2020 project COMPOSELECTOR is to develop a Business Decision Support System (BDSS), which integrates materials modelling, business tools and databases into a single workflow to support the complex decision process involved in the selection and design of polymer-matrix composites (PMCs) by means of an open integration platform which enables interoperability and information management of materials models and data and connects a rich ‘materials modelling layer’ with industry standard business process models.

The integration of modelling and simulations techniques to support material selection process is more and more impelling in the materials science and industrial domains, due to the need of effectively designing and producing increasingly sophisticated materials, components and systems with advanced performance on a competitive time scale. In this perspective, for complex structural materials, such as PMCs, there is a particular need in industry for chemistry/physics-based materials models and modelling workflows that fulfil the following requirement: predicting relevant properties and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that capture the performance of materials, accounting for material internal microstructure and effects of processing.

In this scenario, the simulations techniques aims at developing, demonstrating and assessing an easy-to-use multiscale simulation suite that delivers models with feasible computational loads for the design and production of industrial products, i.e., PMCs. Specifically, the project focus on the development of high-fidelity models to predict properties and behaviors of PMCs at all scales, from atomistic to finite element calculations and the development of a multi-scale software-modeling framework which integrates these models across the scales. In this work will be presented i) the exploiting of atomistic simulation to study PMCs thermomechanical properties and their interface phenomena as well; ii) the linking atomistic and mesoscale models and mesoscale models to finite element models; and iii) the development of multiscale simulation protocols for nanostructured materials.