Chemicals company Lanxess plans to work with Citrine Informatics, a US-based artificial intelligence (AI) company, to develop new materials more efficiently.
The two companies have launched a pilot project aimed at gauging the potential of AI for the plastics production. They will initially focus on the sizing of the glass fibers that Lanxess uses for reinforcing many of its plastics.
‘Glass fibers that are mixed with the plastics to increase their mechanical performance are surrounded with a sizing,’ the company said. ‘This helps the glass fibers to bond more strongly with the plastic matrix, ultimately ensuring the properties required of high-performance plastics. The process of optimizing glass fiber sizing is complex, laborious and time-consuming. […] In traditional product development, the complex composition of glass fiber sizings and the numerous variables when manufacturing high-performance plastics require extensive testing, the results of which can be hard to predict. AI can make an important contribution in this case by getting the most out of the available data.’
AI algorithms, which are supplied from measurement results from previous formulations, raw material information and a host of additional data, can calculate forecast models for improved test configurations and parameters, improve these models on the basis of the measurement results from each individual test, and propose the best formulation, Lanxess said.
Source: Materials Today