🌍 Rethinking materials for a sustainable future

How can we choose materials that meet engineering requirements while reducing environmental impact? And how can open data, interactive tools, and artificial intelligence help us make better design decisions?

The Materials & the Environment website is an open, interactive book developed around sustainable structural design at ISAE-SUPAERO, Université de Toulouse. It brings together teaching and research through accessible explanations, interactive figures, datasets, and computational examples.

The central idea is simple: material selection is not just about strength, stiffness, weight, or cost. Environmental indicators and the impact of a product throughout its life cycle also matter. By making these trade-offs visible, the website helps readers explore how engineering performance and sustainability can be considered together.

Explore the chapters

The website is organised into six main chapters, moving from established material-selection methods towards data-driven design and life-cycle assessment:

  • Ashby’s Maps — Explore material-property charts, performance indices, trade-offs, and eco-costs to understand how different materials compare.
  • Ashby’s Maps, Renewed — Discover how machine learning can represent materials in a continuous, searchable latent space, opening new ways to explore material-selection options.
  • Mapping the Ecolizer — Examine eco-indicators and eco-indices, and investigate how production routes and electricity mixes affect environmental impact.
  • Brackets, Metals and Carbon — Explore a benchmark of 1,516 bracket–alloy combinations to study the relationship between material choice, structural performance, and carbon emissions.
  • Natural Fibre Composites — Compare plant fibres and their composites with conventional reinforcement materials in terms of stiffness, weight, cost, energy, and fatigue performance.
  • A Simple Eco Audit — Follow energy use and COâ‚‚ emissions across five life-cycle phases, with practical examples such as PET versus reusable bottles and steel versus aluminium bumpers.

The chapters include interactive figures and tools that let readers adjust parameters, compare alternatives, and investigate the consequences of different design choices.

Connecting materials science, AI, and eco-design

The website also highlights how machine learning can support engineering design. Variational autoencoders (VAEs), for example, can map material data into a latent space that can be explored computationally. These methods offer new ways to search for promising candidates, while also raising important questions about data quality, model limitations, and the reliability of predictions.

Another focus is the relationship between structural design and environmental performance. Choosing a material cannot always be separated from choosing a shape: both influence mass, mechanical performance, and the impacts associated with manufacturing and use. Eco-costs, eco-indicators, energy demand, and carbon emissions can help make these trade-offs more explicit.

Open educational resources and research

The project connects educational material with open research resources, including notebooks, datasets, and code. This makes it possible to go beyond reading about a method and explore the underlying data and computational approaches.

Whether you are a student learning about material selection, a researcher working on data-driven design, or an engineer interested in eco-design, the website offers a practical starting point for investigating how materials, computation, and environmental assessment can inform better decisions.

đź”— Explore Materials & the Environment

Open data. Interactive learning. Smarter material choices. Better environmental performance. ♻️

#MaterialsScience #OpenScience #ArtificialIntelligence #EcoDesign #MechanicalEngineering #Sustainability