When our industrial customers need an adhesive solution that does not readily exist on the market, our product developers get into action. Their challenge: when inventing new materials, they often need to juggle more than a dozen raw materials and meet even more customer requirements at the same time. For a battery adhesive such requirements do include viscosity, flow behavior, initial and final adhesion, elasticity, and resistance to environmental impact, which are only one part of the equation. Other, more universal asks, include sustainability requirements (such as the carbon footprint of all raw materials), health & safety concerns, and of course cost criteria. The result: a multidimensional set of data that is more than the human mind can easily cope with.
This is where advanced data analytics comes in. Just like a magnifying glass, they make structures in data visible long before the human eye can detect them, highlighting levers to control the performance of a materials formula. Beyond that Advanced Data Analytics can suggest new formulation accounting for utilizing the multidimensional set of data. This data analysis helps avoiding tedious and time-consuming trial-and-error loops.
But how do the algorithms know which of the solutions is likely to be successful? Experience is the answer. Henkel’s data analysts can help adhesive developers to utilize information of millions of previous experiments carried out in Henkel labs all over the world. Taking those data and combining them with the domain knowledge of the developer, data analysts can train models suggesting new promising mixture. In concrete examples new material formulations, proposed by our algorithms, show an average success rate of 38 percent (vs. 8 percent in manually designed experiments).
In that way, our product development creates fast customized solutions for a wide range of industries: from automotive, to electronics, to packaging, or even consumer goods such as diapers. Creating value for our customers, we help to make them stay ahead of the pack.