Data Ecosystems for Scientific Experiments: Managing Combustion Experiments and Simulation Analyses in Chemical Engineering

The development of scientific predictive models has been of great interest over the decades. A scientific model is capable of forecasting domain outcomes without the necessity of performing expensive experiments. In particular, in combustion kinetics, the model can help improving the combustion facilities and the fuel efficiency reducing the pollutants. At the same time, the amount of available scientific data has increased and helped speeding up the continuous cycle of model improvement and validation. This has also opened new opportunities for leveraging a large amount of data to support knowledge extraction. However, experiments are affected by several data quality problems since they are a collection of information over several decades of research, each characterized by different representation formats and reasons of uncertainty. In this context, it is necessary to develop an automatic data ecosystem capable of integrating heterogeneous information sources while maintaining a quality repository. We present an innovative approach to data quality management from the chemical engineering domain, based on an available prototype of a scientific framework, SciExpeM, which has been significantly extended. We identified a new methodology from the model development research process that systematically extracts knowledge from the experimental data and the predictive model. In the paper, we show how our general framework could support the model development process, and save precious research time also in other experimental domains with similar characteristics, i.e., managing numerical data from experiments.