Materials Maturity Levels: A Systematic Approach to Evaluating Materials Development

Abstract Materials development is a complex task that may start with a predicted property for a material that exists only in a computer. To arrive at a maturity level for a specific application that will use the material requires substantial synthesis, scale-up, and testing to prove reliability, demonstrate that a new material has the required properties, and thereby gain the trust of the relevant design community. A multi-year process is typically required to reach such an end-state with many cases of failure along the way when funding runs out or an application imposes demands beyond the capability of a given material. This report proposes a framework of Materials Maturity Levels for such a development sequence that systematizes the various stages of materials development and maturation. A spreadsheet is provided as a checklist for evaluating or assessing the current maturity level of a material. The need is explained for increasing involvement of an intended application with advances in maturity, leading to an emphasis on the value of co-design (i.e., that the application and the material should be designed hand-in-hand because each affects the other). The extent to which any given material must be embedded in a composite structure is discussed because this is commonly required for electronic materials (more so than structural materials). Simulation of processing, microstructure, and properties at each level is crucial to track and accelerate the entire maturation process which is well described by the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI). Currently, simulation makes the strongest contribution to materials discovery but is expected to become increasingly useful for predicting development, processing, and manufacturing workflows. This, in turn, points out the importance of verification and validation (V&V) in software tools, as well as uncertainty quantification (UQ).