In many materials development projects, scientists and research heads make decisions to guide the project direction. For example, scientists may decide which processing steps to use, what elements to include in their material selection, or from what suppliers to source their materials. Research heads may decide whether to invest development effort in reducing the environmental impact or production cost of a material. When making these decisions, it would be helpful to know how those decisions affect the achievable performance of the materials under consideration. Often, these decisions are complicated by trade-offs in performance between competing properties. This paper presents an approach for visualizing and evaluating design spaces, where a design space is defined as the set of possible materials under consideration given specified constraints. This design space visualization approach is applied to two case studies with environmental impact motivations: one in biodegradability for solvents, and the other in sustainable materials sourcing for Li-ion batteries. The results demonstrate how this visualization approach can enable data-driven, quantitative decisions for project direction.

中文翻译：

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设计空间可视化以指导对可生物降解和可持续来源材料的投资

在许多材料开发项目中，科学家和研究负责人做出决定以指导项目方向。例如，科学家可以决定使用哪些加工步骤，在他们的材料选择中包含哪些元素，或者从哪些供应商处采购他们的材料。研究负责人可能会决定是否投资开发工作以减少材料对环境的影响或生产成本。在做出这些决定时，了解这些决定如何影响所考虑材料的可实现性能会很有帮助。通常，这些决定会因竞争属性之间的性能权衡而变得复杂。本文提出了一种可视化和评估设计空间的方法，其中设计空间被定义为在给定指定约束的情况下考虑的可能材料的集合。这种设计空间可视化方法应用于两个具有环境影响动机的案例研究：一个是溶剂的生物降解性，另一个是锂离子电池的可持续材料采购。结果展示了这种可视化方法如何能够为项目方向提供数据驱动的定量决策。