Piet Marchal and Gerhard Ziegmann, 9/8/00.

This paper presents important aspects of materials research and development as perceived by the participants in the DOGMA materials development cluster. It describes interactions and parties concerned in materials development which it means to put into the broader perspective of technological development. At the same time it is an introduction to succesfull materials development case studies of DOGMA partners [1] and to the design sequence and methodology of new materials solutions [2].

The functions of products are influenced and sometimes directly defined by customers and producers, and also by local, national and international authorities. On the basis of information communicated by these parties designers or engineers generate product options which are expected to fulfil the needs perceived. In between bounderies set by the availability of resources these options specify form and function of the product and determine aspects as production methods, costs and recycability. A schematic representation of this perception of product development is given in figure 1. The resources listed are constituents of every day life and new developments will depart from this basis. Also succesfull product developments will be added to existing resources, thus giving a recursive character to the way resources develop.

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Figure 1. Key words and relations in product development.

In our society technological developments are initiated either by market pull or technology push. In the case of market pull the requirements and needs are created by the market and market parties. In the case of technology push new possibilities are created by research results which are offered to the market to create new solutions and improved functionalities.

Developments may come from ideas of individuals, from small enterprises, from large industrial companies, from scientific research groups or from networks that involve different parties. In niche markets individuals having special skills or knowledge may have opportunities to contribute to developments as advisors or problem solvers. The work may be organized in an informal manner and implementation times of suggested improvements may be typically in the order of weeks or months. In large industrial companies on the other hand development projects, for instance the development of a new car model, are highly organized and may have typical development times of 3-5 years. Academic researchers and research groups have to find their way in the topics they want to address. Direction is given by the articles that are published in the international literature, conferences, national research programms and fundings that can be raised.

The successive contributions of all the different parties may add up in time, thus constituting an evolutionary proces of stepwise improvements in existing materials in which a breakthrough as the discovery or the invention of a new material occurs from time to time.

The discovery of a new material can open the way to applications unknown at the time of the discovery. Aluminium and the development of aviation as we know it today or celluloid and cinema may be examples thereof. Also new materials may revolutionize existing practices and applications, think of

• paper and writing
• semi conducting materials and computers
• plastics and packaging.

Step wise improvements in existing materials are a means to maintain and extend market share in a competitive market. The development over the last decades of steel grades with improved strength, formabilaty and corrosion resistance may serve as an example of this as may the improvements in a wide range of synthetic materials. Much of these improvements are achieved by optimization of processing, which demands a great deal of effort in industrial and academic research.

Another way to improve on materials functionality is to make combinations of existing materials as is done in composites and sandwich materials for instance. This approach allows in general a quicker response to the market expectations and synergistic effects may occur.

Last but not least new combinations of existing materials and existing applications or products are very important to develop materials in a market sense.

The above gives different modes of materials development. These different modes are associated with different time scales. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate general development directions and associated development times respectively.

Figure 2. General directions in materials development.

The lower left area in figure 2 stands for combinations of existing materials and existing applications. Materials development starts from this basis and can ultimately arrive at a new material in a new application which is represented by the upper right area. It may be that first a new application is developed which triggers the need for a new material, as for instance was the case for semiconductors in electronic devices, or it may be that a new material changes the impact of a certain application dramatically as for instance was the case for the application of plastics in packaging which facilitated the growth of grocery stores into supermarkets and mega-stores. These different development paths are indicated by the arrows in figure 2. The direct arrow from the lower left area to the upper right area represents the direction of the resultant of different developments in time.

Figure 3. Development times associated with a certain degree of innovation in material and application.

If the degree of innovation of the application and the material are ranked on a scale from 0 to 10 it is possible to draw a diagram as figure 3 which gives an estimate of the development time for a given development.

If, for instance, the degree of material innovation in a certain development is ranked as 2 and the degree of innovation of the application in this development is ranked as 4 a development time of around 8 years is estimated. Or, if both the material innovation and the application innovation are ranked as 10 the estimated development time is more than 50 years. Such a development time might be associated with the earlier example of aluminium and aviation. The perception of what is new changes of course constantly, so the position of a given development result is very likely to change towards the lower left corner of the diagram in figure 3 when time passes by.

This implies that the diagram for a specific development is only valid for a certain period of time.

The classification of the degree of innovation of a given innovation in material or application is to some extend arbitrary and therefore the precision of quantitative information will be limited but still it may be worthwhile to look at some of the earlier examples to get some indication of developments classification and associated development times.

Examples in which we would like to rank the degree of innovation in both the material and the application as 10 are aluminium and aviation and plastic and megastores. Other candidates for these ranking are to be found in the next paragraph of this paper. The time between the first invention or discovery and the mature application is in this cases measured in decades. Developments that take place in time spans like this are the result of the efforts of different groups at different places that are linked in one way or another. In the diagram this is represented by a path consisting of successive steps in different directions, see figure 4.

Figure 4. Possible development path of a development spanning over decades.

Due to much increased budgets and efforts in technical research and education the development time of a technological development representing a certain degree of innovation was much shortened in the course of the twentieth century. In addition development time is reduced by systematic scientific research on optimisation strategies for product and process development wich is driven by the competitive "time to market" aspect. The reduced development times hold for the larger developments which consists of different development steps and also hold for the consecutive steps. Examples giving reduction of development times between 1970 and 2000 are given in figure 5. This figure shows that an equivalent development in the automotive industry takes 4 years started in 1999 against 10 years started in 1970. Against the reference of developments that are ranked 10 in materials and application innovation, the 2-4 years improvement efforts in a given application probably score 4 to 8 either on the material or on the application side. Figure 3 shows that innovations are not simply additive because a given development time, for example 2 years, stands for an innovation level of 4 either in application or in material but for an innovation level of 1 in application and in material adding up to 2 in the combined case. This is because borders of working area’s and expertise have to be crossed in combined innovations.

Figure 5. Reduction of development times over the years.

To give examples to which the foregoing applies we list here some technological developments over the last 200 years.

Materials: plastics, composites, reinforced concrete, teflon, kevlar, nylon, bakelite, aluminium, titanium, magnesium, uranium, amorfic metals, semi conductors, stainless steel, ultra low carbon steel, ceramics with improved impact resistance, laser light, stronger permanent magnets, sandwich materials.

Applications: railway, rocket, radio, sewing machine, grammophone, CD player, hologram, airoplane, magnetron, telephone, GSM, satelite, internet, computer, paperclip, stapler, bicycle, car, hairdryer, asperine, cola, traffic jam, video, TV, diesel engine, ballpoint, parachute, toilet paper, paraglider, fast ferrie, hydrogen bomb, pen light battery, pace maker, infrared telescope, super market, light bulb.

Materials and application combined:

cinema and celluloid, aluminium and aviation, X-rays and internal medicin, uranium and nuclear reactors, semicondutors and computers, semiconductors and mobile phones, rubber and air tires.

Developments in the time regimes of decades probably can be given some direction, for instance by selectively stimulating research and education, but can hardly be managed. Therefore something as the reduction of development times by co-ordinated parallel developments is in these time regimes out of reach.

Development efforts that need and can be organized and managed typically have a duration of a few months upto three or four years. It concerns application orientated research projects which bring the results of basic research to an application and which represent the steep part of the curve in figure 6. Some examples of these type of developments are discussed in our paper presenting the DOGMA case studies on materials development.

Figure 6. Development beginning at the results of basic research and ending in an application of these results.

We also like to refer to our paper giving an outline of common features in materials developments in industrial and joint industrial and academic settings [2]. Together with this introduction paper these two papers represent a line of thought as it precipitated during our DOGMA meetings.

[1] Case studies.

Materials development web page.

[2] Description of the design and material selection proces.

Materials development web page