Toyo Tire Corporation has announced the development of materials informatic technology (MI) to predict properties and optimize the material structure of rubber materials.
The technological innovations are part of the company’s rubber material development platform, Nano Balance Technology which combines observation, prediction, material design, and production control, at the molecular (nano) level to develop a tire.
In recent years Toyo have been using AI machine learning and other technologies in the material development process, but they feel MI technology is about to change the field of material development, making it more accurate, predictable and time efficient.
Since 2018, Toyo Tire has been using MI technology based on accumulated data assets to validate the predictive technology of recipes and physical properties.
Specific areas of MI include recipe development where the introduction of MI technology will allow highly accurate predictions of properties and recipes, which enables efficient material development with minimal testing. The system implements a nonlinear regression model (data modeled by a function based on the nonlinear relationship between the variables used for predictions), which can make expanded predictions by importing external information to a database. This system will also be used in the development of high-performance materials.
MI also utilizes digital technology to develop new materials. Data for material and chemical structures obtained by analysis differs from material property data. Therefore, data for material and chemical structures has mainly been used as information for indirectly predicting material properties. Adopting MI technology to material analysis has made it possible to calculate prediction values of material properties from structural information. As the technology lends itself to the inverse problem of optimizing the structure according to targeted property values, Toyo intend to apply and expand it to the field of new material development.
Toyo Tire also intends to explore the potential of using tires as a sensing device and create products that contribute to tomorrow’s mobile society.
