Skip to main content

Creating a True Materials Revolution

Thomas Edison famously remarked that if he tried 10,000 experiments that failed, he didn't actually consider it a failure, but found 10,000 things that didn't work. That's true, but it's also incredibly tedious, time consuming and expensive. The new methods, however, have the potential to automate those 10,000 failures, which is creating a revolution in materials science.
For example, at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a US government initiative to create the next generation of advanced batteries, the major challenge now is not so much to identify potential battery chemistries, but that the materials to make those chemistries work don't exist yet. Historically, that would have been an insurmountable problem, but not anymore.


"Using high performance computing simulations, materials genomes and other techniques that have  been developed over the last decade or so, we can often eliminate as much as 99% of the possibilities that won't work," George Crabtree, Director at JCESR told me. "That means we can focus our efforts on the remaining 1% that may have serious potential, and we can advance much farther, much faster for far less money."
The work is also quickly making an impact on industry. Greg Mulholland, President of Citrine Informatics, a firm that applies machine learning to materials development, told me, "We've seen a huge broadening of companies and industries that are contacting us and a new sense of urgency. For companies that historically invested in materials research, they want everything yesterday. For others that haven't, they are racing to get up to speed."
Jim Warren, a Director at the Materials Genome Initiative, thinks that is just the start. "When you can discover new materials for hundreds of thousands or millions dollars rather than tens or hundreds of millions you are going to see a vast expansion of use cases and industries that benefit," he told me.
As we have learned from the digital revolution, any time you get a 10x improvement in efficiency, you end up with a transformative commercial impact. Just about everybody I've talked to working in materials thinks that pace of advancement is easily achievable over the next decade. Welcome to the materials revolution.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Metals and Alloys

Metals and alloys are materials that are usually exhausting, malleable, and have smart electrical and thermal conduction. Alloys are created by melting 2 or additional components together, at least one of them a metal. They need properties that improve those of the constituent components, such larger strength or resistance to corrosion Everybody is aware of what metal is; it is found in thousands of things that surround us every day. Once you begin to conserve some of these metal items, however, you discover that the substance is more sophisticated than it looks. Most things we have a tendency to call metals these days are more accurately known as alloys. True metals are pure elements, whereas alloys are blends of two or additional metals that are fusible together. Metals and alloys are straightforward to distinguish from nonmetals because they're usually shinier, heavier, and tougher than most materials and that they are glorious conductors of heat and electricity. Even so, visu...

Emerging Smart Materials

Polymeric materials assume a significant half in human life. Actually, our body is formed of parcel of polymers, e.g. Proteins , catalysts, and then forth. Different unremarkably happening polymers like wood, elastic, cowhide and silk are serving the mankind for a protracted time currently. Present day logical apparatuses altered the getting ready of polymers along these lines accessible designed polymers like valuable plastics, rubbers and fibre materials. Capacity of a country to tackle nature and its capability to adapt up to the difficulties postured by its controlled by its total information of materials and its capability to form and deliver them for various applications. Propelled Materials are at the core of various mechanical enhancements that touch our lives. smart materials are used for correspondence and information innovation, optical strands, optical device filaments sensors for savvy condition, vitality materials for sustainable power supply and condition, lightweight...

The Birth of the Materials Project

In 2008,  Kristin Persson's  husband took a job in California, so she left Ceder's group at MIT and joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) as a research scientist. Yet, rather than mourn the loss of a key colleague, the team saw the move as an opportunity to shift their work into high gear. "At MIT, we pretty much hacked everything together," Ceder explains. "It all worked, but it was a bit buggy and would have never scaled beyond our small team. At a National Lab, however, they had the resources to build it out properly and create a platform that could really drive things forward." So Persson hit the ground running, got a small grant and stitched together a team to combine the materials work with the high performance supercomputing done at the lab.