Interoperability of Materials Database Systems in Support of Nuclear Energy Development and Potential Applications for Fuel Cell Material Selection

Abstract

Materials database interoperability has been of great interest in recent years for information exchange in support of research and development (R&D). In response to data and knowledge sharing needs of the Gen IV International Forum (GIF) for global collaboration in nuclear energy R&D, the European Commission JRC Institute for Energy and Transport (JRC-IET) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) established a materials database interoperability project that developed techniques for automated materials data exchange between systems hosted at the two institutes—MatDB Online at JRC-IET and the Gen IV Materials Handbook at ORNL, respectively. The work to enable automated exchange of data between the two systems leveraged the XML data import and export functionalities of both systems in combination with recently developed standards for engineering materials data. The preliminary results of data communication between the two systems demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of materials database interoperability, which constructs an interoperation framework that can be seamlessly integrated into the high-throughput First Principles material databases and thus advance the discovery of novel materials in fuel cell applications.

Ontologies and databases on thermophysical properties of nuclear reactor materials

“…The system of data exchange between the above mentioned MatDB in the composition of Online Data & Information Network for Energy and the reference book Gen IV Materials Handbook (https://gen4www.ornl.gov/) prepared in Oak-Ridge National Laboratory is an example of such integration in nuclear engineering. Integration was implemented without physical aggregation of resources by conversion of two different formats into a unified data format (Lin et al 2015). The technique of data import and export in both resources used XML representation not unifying the semantics which requires detailed knowledge of both conceptual frameworks.…”

Accessing Materials Data: Challenges and Directions in the Digital Era

“…Again, as a result, existing data resources are often incompatible in these features, thereby hindering their integration into a more comprehensive system. In many ways, the breadth of uses and user communities for materials data is more complex than the data themselves, resulting in additional challenges in building and disseminating materials databases [104,105].…”