Examples of collaborative research projects whose consortium members will continuously implement the results of NFDI-MatWerk, resulting in an immediate impact and a fast feedback loop:
- The Rhineland-Palatinate focus area "Advanced Materials Engineering" (AME) at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) bundles the TUK's materials-related research activities on an interdisciplinary platform with participating scientists from the fields of materials science and engineering, production, and process engineering, physics, and computer science. The collective work of AME members led, among others, to the foundation of SFB 926 "MICOS" and IRTG 2057 "Physical Modeling for Virtual Manufacturing Systems and Processes." In the coming years, AME will serve as TUK's primary platform for digital data representation and processing in materials-related research.
- The limits cluster of excellence at the University of Freiburg will implement an ontology-based graph database as a shared data space that bridges the gap between philosophy, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, materials science, mechanics, microsystems engineering, and processing. NFDI-MatWerk's tools and data space architecture will foster highly interdisciplinary research within limits by enabling continuous digital workflows and enhancing collaboration within shared labs and workspaces.
- The Cluster of Excellence initiative "3D Matter Made to Order" of KIT and Heidelberg University follows a highly interdisciplinary approach combining natural sciences and engineering. The planned research cluster focuses on three-dimensional additive manufacturing techniques from the molecular level to the macroscopic dimension. These techniques will fabricate components and systems in nano printing at maximum process speed and resolution for novel materials and life sciences applications. NFDI-MatWerk's tools and data space architecture will accelerate the development of efficient digital workflows within the cluster.
- The availability of platform-independent open-source software for standard processing data defined in the Materials Data Space will enable international visibility. In particular, this will be an essential component in enabling heterogeneous teams to collect, process, and analyze objects within the MDS. Cross-institutional development of this software, associated data formats, and sustainable hosting of the source code, use cases, and accessible documentation is central to achieving the expected standard. At the University of Stuttgart, projects along the lines of the Open Software and Data Hub (OpenDASH), which is currently being established as part of the Cluster of Excellence Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech, EXC2075), could serve as a starting point.
- In the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1232 "From Colored States to Evolutionary Engineering Materials" (planned duration until 2028), data within material-based process chains are determined in experimental high-throughput, processed using machine learning algorithms, and used for modeling. The NFDI-MatWerk would provide excellent opportunities through external interfaces while standardizing external data queries for the SFB 1232.
- The joint Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR103 "From Atoms to Turbine Blades" of the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Bochum already follows their sample life from casting through processing, testing, and characterization, collecting and integrating experimental data from different sources and scales, and combining it with cross-scale modeling. It is a test bed for the software tools and workflows developed in the NFDI-MatWerk.
- The research network GRK 1869 "In-situ microscopy with electrons, X-rays and scanning probes" at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg will test and adapt the workflows and tools developed in NFDI-MatWerk with a particular focus on correlative and in-situ microscopy. The GRK 2423 "Fracture across Scales" research network at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg will investigate the implementation, training, and acceptance of electronic laboratory notebooks and standardized workflows in a collaborative, scalable modeling framework. Furthermore, accelerating materials innovation for energy materials relevant to photovoltaic applications is the central goal of the collaborative project between the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg (HI-ErN), the Department of Materials Science at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, and ZAE Bayern. This collaboration will directly benefit from the coordination between the Helmholtz institutes and universities within NFDI-MatWerk.