LANXESS announced that its polyurethane system business unit and material artificial intelligence company Citrine Informatics (CI) have reached a project partnership to start a prepolymer product expansion project. The project uses artificial intelligence to shorten the delivery time and provide customers with a customized polyurethane system to meet the different needs in new application fields.
LANXESS claims that CI is an industry leader that uses data and artificial intelligence to accelerate the development of materials and chemicals. With its technological innovation, CI was rated as a technological pioneer by the World Economic Forum and cooperated with some of the world's top universities. According to reports, at the initial stage of the project, LANXESS will expand its prepolymer-based recipe database and add more data points to the recipe database by using the CI artificial intelligence platform. This involves correlating existing empirical measurement data with the knowledge of process experts and chemical sensing algorithms to calculate other measured values, meaning that only a small number of actual measurements are required to verify the numbers determined by artificial intelligence.
Markus Eckert, head of the LANXESS Polyurethane Systems business unit, said that in the next step, LANXESS data experts and process experts will explore the reliability of using AI to predict the best formula to meet customer specific requirements for product characteristics. If the follow-up test is successful, LANXESS will be able to meet customer requirements faster and more effectively, and LANXESS ’existing formulation knowledge will also be enhanced through artificial intelligence-assisted formulation design.
He Weike, head of the LANXESS digitalization program, believes that chemists have so far largely relied on their expertise and Years of experience. Artificial intelligence is expected to become an important tool to help them expand their knowledge and significantly reduce the number of tests required.
Eckert said that LANXESS has accumulated some experience in using artificial intelligence. In a pilot project in cooperation with CI, LANXESS is using artificial intelligence to optimize glass fibers to further enhance the performance of LANXESS high-performance plastics. Artificial intelligence is expected to shorten the development time of the required formula by more than half, so that customers can get better and customized products in a shorter time. "Most employees who are already using artificial intelligence can't imagine reusing the work methods of the past. The use of digital technology is increasingly becoming a standard procedure at LANXESS." He Weike said.
LANXESS launched its digitalization plan in 2017 and established a dedicated team for this purpose. The core action area of the plan is the development of digital business models, the introduction of new technologies in the value chain, the development and utilization of big data, and the cultivation of employees ’digital expertise.