SBIR Phase I: Polymer Workbench: Web Service Based Modeling Application Service and Integration for the Polymer Industry

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This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a prototype Polymer Workbench - for use by scientists/ engineers in the polymer industry - using the concept and tools developed around Web Services. Large investments in developing models for use in polymer manufacturing are not effectively utilized as the usage is currently limited to few specialists because the user needs to navigate through a multitude of models in a multiple and highly disjointed user environment, often requiring tedious manual transfer of data and modeling results from one environment to another. The Polymer Workbench will address this need through applying Web Services concept designed to allow the user to access a large number of various polymer models through a single software platform with common user interface, database, and communication protocol for all models. This work will develop the common communication protocol by developing an XML-based markup language specific for polymers, PolymerML, to achieve standardization of the data and information flow between the user and models. The proposed work will address this important need in a very large industry where annual sales in the U.S. for polymer materials alone are $250 billion and expenditure on modeling and simulation exceeds $ 100 million.