Smart Materials and Digital Twins: Synergistic Innovation and Future Outlook for Carbon Neutrality in Infrastructure

Abstract

Against the backdrop of deepening global carbon neutrality commitments, infrastructure’s low-carbon transformation has entered a critical phase of technological breakthroughs and large-scale applications. The synergistic integration of smart materials (SMs) and digital twin (DT) technology, a core technical pathway for infrastructure carbon neutrality, has fostered continuous innovative applications and theoretical achievements. However, current research still faces unresolved issues, including insufficient adaptability of SM-DT integration in extreme environments, lack of cross-scale collaboration mechanisms, and unclear coupling paths with emerging technologies. To address these gaps, this study focuses on SM-DT synergistic innovation and its future development direction: it summarizes the latest progress of SM-DT integration in infrastructure carbon neutrality, explores its synergistic mechanisms with emerging technologies like AI, blockchain and IoT in carbon management, analyzes application challenges in extreme climate regions and cross-border infrastructure, and proposes a future development framework of “technology integration – system optimization – industrial ecology” with targeted policy suggestions. This study enriches the theoretical system of SM-DT synergistic carbon reduction and provides forward-looking references for high-quality development of low-carbon infrastructure.

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