Advanced Materials

The metal additive manufacturing market will be negatively impacted by the 2020 pandemic. Despite this short-to-mid-term setback, the industry is forecast to rise and exceed $10Bn within the next 10-years. The emerging and established printer players grab nearly all of the headlines, but most of this forecast annual revenue will be in material sales in which there is great untapped potential.

In the past two decades, the car market has declined twice: first due to the 2008 economic crisis, and then due to falling sales in China. Most recently, the lockdowns implemented to combat the coronavirus pandemic, causing auto-production plants to close globally and a loss of consumer spending will lead to an unprecedented 23% decline in 2020 (IDTechEx prediction).

Nearly every sector is proposing the use of artificial intelligence. Materials science R&D is relatively late to this trend, and there are many industry-specific hurdles, but the opportunities are beginning to be realized and the potential impact is significant.

Tuesday 11 August - The electric car market is facing fresh, unforeseen challenges in 2020, and in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, electric vehicles with a higher upfront price are a hard sell. How is the industry, and how are governments, responding? Are electric cars de-railed from their pre-coronavirus trajectory?

MicroLED, believed by many to be the next generation of display technology, has been pursued by players of LED, display, OEM, materials and so on. Differentiated from LCD and OLED, microLED is considered to be the only display technology that has no size limitation. What are the potential applications?

Deep learning has revolutionized image recognition and analysis, making unprecedented performance leaps between 2010-2014. These rapid advancements enabled the development of automated, accurate, accessible, and cost-effective medical diagnostics.

Bioplastics, plastics made from a biological feedstock, could be a renewable and more sustainable alternative to fossil-based plastics. Unlike the vast majority of fossil-based plastics, many bioplastics are biodegradable, which could help provide a solution to the dizzying escalation in plastic waste seen across much of the world. And although bioplastics have historically struggled to deliver the same performance as fossil-based plastics, technology is increasingly closing the gap, creating highly functional plastics that do not cost the Earth. "Bioplastics 2020-2025", the recent report by IDTechEx, explores the emerging technologies around bioplastics and forecasts the future of the industry over the next five years.

In the future, all materials scientists and chemists will have access to machine learning tools to enhance their R&D. Seamlessly integrating these underlying operations will not happen quickly, but overlooking the developments in materials informatics will lead to a loss of any competitive advantage.

Solid-state batteries keep attracting tremendous attention and investment with the maturing technologies and closeness to mass production. Even with the influence of COVID-19, the potential market size is expected to grow to over $6 billion by 2030 according to IDTechEx.

The world has a problem with plastic waste. Despite global plastic production continuing to accelerate, recycling rates remain stubbornly low, with only about 15% of the 400 million tonnes of plastic currently produced annually being recycled.