Circular economy in the automotive industry

Against the background of the vision of 'One NFDI', consortia are increasingly faced with the question of overarching metadata models, common metadata standards, and interoperable workflow solutions. Research in Engineering Sciences currently involves several consortia. They have set up a standing working group with the aim of finding concrete solutions in transdisciplinary research data management. One such use case addresses the reuse of components in the automotive industry, reacting to the economic and environmental challenges of our society. This applies to steel components as used in the drive technology, similarly as to components composed of (mixtures of) polymers as used in seats bumpers and armatures, as well as critical raw materials as used in car batteries. However, the heterogeneity of these components, and unknown status and previous usage are a challenge. To make the reuse strategies sustainable and efficient, the systematic recording of data throughout the whole life cycle of the material is therefore mandatory, including the raw material, the processing, the product development, the manufacturing, the operational life in products and the recycling process. Batteries, for example, are disassembled in an automated way once reaching end of life, then refurbished and tested for a new lifecycle. Similarly, certain steel and polymer components in vehicles can be reused or recycled in terms of scrap material. These procedures involve a large number of stakeholders, which can interact optimally if the data are FAIR. With the present contribution, we demonstrate how a combination of tools can enable such a FAIR data exchange between several NFDI consortia for a few typical components in automotive applications. An important challenge remains ensuring that the exchange of data, metadata, semantic data, and concepts for data processing between several NFDI consortia can be performed without the loss of information [4,5]. There are joint efforts towards standardizing software tools in order to help tackle this challenge. We demonstrate this for the exchange of workflows in computational materials design, by combining the integrated development environment pyiron from NFDI-MatWerk [4] with the workflow system KaDI4Mat used in NFDI4ING [6]. The progress of this development is shown for the semantic simulation of the steel processing [7]. Furthermore, the concept of the digital product passport is meanwhile an established concept to digitally collect the product's information along the life cycle, including data on the environmental impact. Here, the interoperability of heterogeneous data sources has been identified as the main enabler [8]. The performance of this approach is demonstrated for the digital battery passport, highlighting similarities with other relevant concepts such as digital data sheets (NFDI4ING, NFDI4Cat) [9, 10]. The digital availability of data is impacting the real world when battery data is used to decide for battery recycling or remanufacturing, and to physically disassemble it (like in the project REVAMP). The FAIR Digital Object approach [11] is followed in all consortia to provide data as well as related metadata and code in an encapsulated and FAIR way. In many cases, a minimum information standard helps to ensure FAIR data for every used methodology, as exemplified in NFDI4Chem [12]. When it comes to recycling of polymers, the composition of the polymers (e.g. colorants, additives) but also the side reactions during their recycling need to be represented in a machine-readable way. Here, the International Chemical Identifier (InChI) can help [13].