Digital representation

We engage in a broad range of activities to improve the digitization of materials and materials research. To this end, we emphasize the development of advanced modeling and simulation methods to accelerate materials research. A strong pillar of these activities is the Virtual Materials Design initiative which contributes to the Joint Lab “Virtual Materials Design” of Helmholtz Information. In this context, we integrate artificial intelligence and foundational models into materials research, making these techniques available to a larger audience. We develop user-friendly workflows to make these complex computational frameworks available to users with no background in simulation methods or software engineering.

These efforts will culminate in the development of materials acceleration platform, where digital technologies will steer the materials discovery process in autonomous self-driving laboratories.

We also help researchers document and share their results in electronic lab notebooks, such as Chemotion or Kadi4Mat. These activities contribute to the National Research Data Initiative in the projects NDFI4Chem, NFDI-MatWerk, NFDI4ING and more. We not only focus on the needs of academic research, but contribute, in the Plattform MaterialDigital, to make research data available among industrial partners in a sematic and interoperable fashion.