Design space visualization for guiding investments in biodegradable and sustainably sourced materials

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.