Materials Curation: A Tool for Drawing Material Design Principles

A tool is proposed for drawing materials design principles to help in accelerating the research and development of materials. This aims to help researchers to use alternatives to (sometimes) non-scientific customs or conventions in finely subdivided, narrow scientific fields. Instead, it enables the exploration of materials within broad, multidisciplinary fields based on the scientific principles of their function and performance with full utilization of the materials information available. Several examples are presented using this tool. Following this, the flowchart for drawing design principles with the tool, and its characteristic features are explained. The relationships and combinations of various types of materials quantities are considered based solely on the essential conditions from scientific principles, without reference to technical possibilities. These relationships and combinations between the different physical or chemical properties are used to create a connecting network using scientific principles. Materials search through various databases using informatics tools is required to suggest concrete materials that match these design principles. High throughput synthesis/analysis/theoretical calculations such as Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations are necessary to optimize the materials suggested for practical applications.