The DILEMA-K project is dedicated to the digitization of material research and component technology for high-performance technical ceramics. Support for ceramic material development processes through information processing tools has been limited to date. There is a clear discrepancy between this and the functional and economic significance of these materials. The reasons for this lie both in the complex nature of ceramics themselves, which means that traditional systematic experimental materials development is only supported to a limited extent by theory and modeling, and in the market structure itself.

DILEMA-K follows on directly from the MaterialDigital1 projects SmaDi and KNOW-NOW. However, the concepts developed in these projects have not yet been able to address industrially relevant problems in the field of digitization of materials and component development and combine them into a coherent overall concept. They were therefore not effective in practice. DILEMA-K therefore derives its objectives from the methodological weaknesses and shortcomings identified in the predecessor projects.

The overall objective of DILEMA-K is to

(i) create the necessary data structures for the joint structuring, storage, linking, and processing of all data generated throughout the life cycle of functional ceramic materials and components,

(ii) to develop tools for data-based material, technology, component, and application development, and

(iii) to apply, test, and validate these in selected, industrially relevant material development processes, component technologies, and applications.

Two exemplary material groups will be used for this purpose: lead-free piezoceramic materials with their texturing technology and ferrite-based multilayer inductors. In addition to data from material development, technology, and application, data from recycling processes at different processing stages will be generated and included. This is equivalent to creating a digital twin of a material or component for which all data generated in development, manufacturing, distribution, application, and recycling processes can be jointly organized, viewed, and therefore also evaluated.

This pursues the overarching goal of increasing the quality of scientific results from targeted material development processes while reducing experimental effort compared to the previous, largely systematic-experimental development approach.