Despite the concept of Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) is dated back to the ’80, their potential has been just recognized with the advent of additive manufacturing. The relevant data about this new class of material are radically different from the traditional engineering materials, however the method of sharing still rely on charts on scientific publication or general-purpose database. Unfortunately, this approach is no more compatible with the pace and interconnection level of today's world. A new approach in knowledge engineering uses ontologies to formalize facts about a certain domain making them easily available both for humans and digital agents.

In this paper, a prototypical version of an ontology for the characterization and utilization of FGM is proposed considering different actors, playing with the same information from different perspective. An already existing FGM ontology is used as a starting point for this work. It was developed for classification purpose, without taking into consideration any actual hands-on experience and without involving all the actors that might be interested in. In this paper, material engineers have been involved as one of the two sides that might be interested in: they hold the actual information and rules needed to populate the ontology. Product engineers are the other face of the coin: they make use of material data in order to give the product being design certain functionality and characteristics. Consequently, the new ontology has two branches which communicate with one another and serve different purposes. One branch accommodates data about basic materials and the rules to combine them to obtain an FGM. The material engineers can use this branch to record the creation of materials as well as its characteristics and performance. Furthermore, he/she can also query the ontology to find already existing solution. The second branch includes classes and relationship to describe the geometry and the functionality of the product. Specifically, the product engineer describes the geometry of the object and asserts the desired characteristic at a certain spatial location. At this point, the ontology can be queried to find out which materials, FGMs included, are suitable to realize the product. Alternatively, in case the material has been already asserted, the ontology is able to check back whether the project requirements can be fulfilled or not. The two branches, operating under the same environment without any inconsistency, provides a common framework enabling the extensive use of this knowledge both for humans and digital agents. The development of the ontology followed a bottom-up approach: starting from a case study about a Functionally Graded Material, a minimum working example has been developed.

In this scenario, materials and design engineers access the same information, with different levels of detail, and the ontology acts as a common framework and as third-party and independent certification agency, thanks to the reasoning capability. The benefit for material engineers is an easy access to a material repository where they can check, not only the value of certain properties, but also how they were obtained. It can also serve to discover contradictory results among the cases mapped within the ontology, e.g. different trends of a certain property for the same material. Material software and simulations tools can retrieve data from it without semantic inconsistency and ambiguity. Finally, product engineers can benefit from a source-reliable and verified repository and make use of the state-of-the-art materials in their project.


Ontologies As a Tool for Design and Material Engineers

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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