1st Edition

The Digital Transformation of Product Formulation Concepts, Challenges, and Applications for Accelerated Innovation

Edited By Alix Schmidt, Kristin Wallace Copyright 2025
363 Pages 113 B/W Illustrations
by CRC Press

363 Pages 113 B/W Illustrations
by CRC Press

In competitive manufacturing industries, organizations embrace product development as a continuous investment strategy since both market share and profit margin stand to benefit. Formulating new or improved products has traditionally involved lengthy and expensive experimentation in laboratory or pilot plant settings. However, recent advancements in areas from data acquisition to analytics are... Read more

Section 1: Getting Started

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

1. The Digital Transformation of R&D Labs

Michael C. Heiber and Christopher Farrow

2. Product Formulation Fundamentals

Kristin Wallace and Alix Schmidt

3. Defining a Successful Predictive Formulation Project

Alix Schmidt

Section 2: Preparing Your Data

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

4. Challenges with Formulation Datasets

Kristin Wallace

5. Feature Engineering: Enhancing Your Data with Descriptors

Daniel Christiansen, Jerome Claracq and Sukrit Mukhopadhyay

6. Machine Learning for Analysis of Structural Characterization

Arthi Jayaraman and Shizhao Lu

Section 3: Predictive Modeling

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

7. Machine Learning Techniques for Predicting Properties of Formulations

Maxwell Hutchinson, Erin Antono and Sean Paradiso

8. Modeling of Product Formulations Using a Latent Variable Approach

Alexander Nguyen and Marlene Cardin

9. Gaining Trust in Your Model

Marlene Cardin

Section 4: Optimization and Inverse Design

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

10. Introduction to Formulation Optimization

Alix Schmidt, Luis Briceno-Mena, Sreekanth Rajagopalan, Kaiwen Ma, Benjamin Reiner and Birgit Braun

11. Adaptive Experimental Design

Joel C.J. Strickland, Phillip F.D. Woolston and Thomas M. Whitehead

12. Inverse Design via PLS Model Inversion

Daniel Palací-López, Joan Borràs-Ferrís, Pierantonio Facco, Massimiliano Barolo and Alberto Ferrer

Section 5: Case Studies and Special Topics

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

13. Case Studies

Kristin Wallace and Alix Schmidt

14. Special Topics

Anne-Catherine Bedard and Mengjie Liu; Anastasia Nikolakopoulou, Ou Yang and Gabriele Bano; Joan Borràs-Ferrís, Daniel Palací-López Alberto Ferrer and Carl Duchesne; Arthi Jayaraman, Shizhao Lu and Alix Schmidt

15. Conclusion

Alix Schmidt and Kristin Wallace

Biography

Alix Schmidt is a senior data scientist in Dow’s Core R&D Information Research team in Midland, Michigan. Alix earned a BS in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 2009 and then joined Dow Corning initially as a process research engineer. Since then, Alix has held a variety of roles at Dow Corning and Dow and completed an MS in data science at Northwestern University. Alix has experience with polymer process research, high-throughput research, machine learning for manufacturing troubleshooting, and data-driven product development. Her interest and experience in materials informatics allow her to lead technical data science strategy at Dow, and she has presented and chaired at the AIChE spring meeting on this topic.

Kristin Wallace earned a BS in chemical engineering (2006) and an MS in applied science (optimization focus) (2008) at McMaster University. She has worked on a variety of analytics projects since joining ProSensus Inc. in 2018 as a project engineer in Burlington, Ontario. Her particular interest in product formulation using projection to latent structures (PLS) has led her to be involved with related consulting projects, contributing to the development of FormuSense (commercial software), authoring blogs and magazine articles, as well as presenting and chairing at several AIChE spring meetings. Prior to working at ProSensus, she spent five years designing and troubleshooting non-ferrous electric arc furnaces.

“…a valued resource for production formulators in multiple industries.” —Marlene Cardin, ProSensus, Canada

 “Altogether, this book presents a unique perspective on product development challenges and approaches that are pertinent to a wide range of industries. The diverse expertise of the authors reflect the current state of the diverse, interdisciplinary field.” —Jeffrey Ting, Nanite, Inc., US