Kcarbon and Citrine Informatics Use AI-Driven Development to Localize Supply Chain for Carbon Fiber Additives

STARTING WITH NO HISTORICAL DATA, KCARBON VALIDATED VIABLE ADDITIVES FOR CARBON FIBER MANUFACTURING IN JUST 5 MONTHS. THE AI-DRIVEN APPROACH, GUIDED BY THE CITRINE PLATFORM, SUGGESTED FORMULATIONS THAT HIT TARGETS AT 4 TIMES THE RATE OF THE TRADITIONAL R&D PROCESS.

Kcarbon, an innovative South Korean agency established to advance the Korean carbon industry ecosystem through business and research support, partnered with Citrine Informatics to evaluate  whether an AI-driven approach would more efficiently develop formulations used to process carbon fibers. The Kcarbon team had no previous experience with these particular additives and the capital equipment for the process was brand new. No historical data was available to train the AI model.

Citrine and Kcarbon decided on 20 initial formulations to test. After these initial experiments there was a dual track approach. Track 1: traditional R&D approach used to suggest the next experiments. Track 2: the Citrine Platform used to suggest the next experiments. Track 2, the AI-driven approach recommended formulations that met target properties at a rate 4 times higher than the traditional R&D approach.

“AI-based material development is efficient and easy-to-use. It helped us go beyond intuitive recipes,” said Dr. Moonheui Hahn, Project Manager, KCARBON.

“It was great to see how quickly the AI model was able to recommend formulations that performed similar to state of the art, commercially available formulations, but using new, locally sourced ingredients from South Korea.” Lawrence Wang, Data Scientist, Citrine Informatics.

For companies exploring new product lines or whose historical data is not machine-readable, this project demonstrates that they can also leverage AI to accelerate product and process optimization.

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Citrine Informatics is the provider of the award-winning materials informatics software platform for data-driven materials and chemicals development. It won the 2017 World Materials Forum Start- up Challenge, the 2018 AI Breakthrough award as the “Best AI-based Solution for Manufacturing,” and 2020-2021 Cleantech 100 honors. The Citrine Platform combines smart materials data infrastructure and AI, which accelerates development of cutting-edge materials, facilitates product portfolio optimization, and codifies research IP, enabling its reuse and preventing its loss. Citrine’s customers include Panasonic, Michelin, LANXESS, and some of the biggest and most respected names in the materials and chemicals industry in Asia, North America, and Europe.

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