Developing wear- and corrosion-resistant coatings with lower environmental and economic impacts requires a design strategy that considers technical performance and sustainability together. The CoBRAIN project funded by the EU 1 addresses this need by investigating thermally sprayed High- Entropy Alloy (HEA) coatings and cermets based on HEA matrices as potential alternatives to conventional solutions containing toxic or critical materials.
The workshop will present the project methodology and its main results, especially focusing on the integration between experiments, physics based modelling and artificial intelligence. The experimental development of feedstock materials and coatings and their characterisation provide data on microstructure, mechanical properties, and functional performance (e.g. wear and corrosion resistance) which are used to inform physical simulations and to verify their predictions.
Experimental and simulated datasets, augmented where needed by existing open datasets, are then used to develop AI models for predicting the properties (e.g. phase composition, hardness, wear and corrosion resistance) of unexplored compositions or, conversely, to provide candidate compositions based on performance requirements. The AI models, combined with a Life Cycle Assessment tool, feed a Sustainable Decision Support System (SDSS) to assist industrial users in selecting coating solutions that achieve the best compromise among technical requirements, environmental impact and economic performance for a specific application.
The workshop will therefore show how this integrated workflow can accelerate materials discovery while embedding Sustainability by Design into coating development. https://www.cobrain-project.eu/
1 Call topic: HORIZON-CL4-2022-RESILIENCE-01-19, HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions, Granting authority: European Health and Digital Executive Agency - Project number: 101092211; Project
name: Integrated Computational-Experimental material Engineering of Thermal Spray coatings