Toray launches digital service to optimize resin selections, product development

Toray Industries Inc. (Tokyo, Japan) is launching a digital service in the second half of fiscal year 2022 that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to predict physical property data for resin products. The service will use
materials informatics technology, which applies statistical analysis and AI to streamline materials development, in drawing on a database. This setup will help customers to quickly optimize resin material selections and shorten development lead times, Toray Industries reports.

Resin materials development conventionally harnesses the expertise and inspiration of skilled researchers, who experiment to create compound formulations. The issue is that evaluating and optimizing resin properties requires a lot of time-consuming trial and error, which has driven a need to streamline materials development.

Toray claims it has amassed a vast amount of high-quality data over several years in pushing the technological boundaries of resin materials development. As a result, the company has greatly improved the accuracy of its forecasting model by using AI to project optimal formulations from empirical data. The system has also been innovated to efficiently predict the physical properties of masses of data.

The company incorporated this system in a database for customers and other external parties and developed a resin material database. Customers are able to understand the properties and availability of currently offered, developed and projected products by entering the properties they require in the system.

Customers will be able to conduct real-time searches for such information as mechanical properties and process characteristics during molding. The resulting seamless and swift flow of material selection, design and prototyping should help customers cut costs, enhance quality and accelerate development, Toray Industries notes. Using the materials property data from searches as data requirements for computer-aided engineering analysis would make it possible to predict the mechanical and process properties of materials themselves. The system could accordingly help customers optimize their selections of resin candidates for materials.

With this digital service, Toray also looks to help customers develop carbon-neutral products by providing information not just about mechanical properties and process characteristics during molding but also about recyclability, long-term degradation characteristics and carbon
dioxide emissions data when using materials.