Materials Science May Be the Most Important Technology of the Next Decade

Think of just about any major challenge we will have to face over the next decade and materials are at the center of it. To build a new clean energy future, we need more efficient solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Manufacturers need new materials to create more advanced products. We also need to replace materials subject to supply disruptions, like rare earth elements.

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Traditionally, developing new materials has been a slow, painstaking process. To find the properties they're looking for, researchers would often have to test hundreds--or even thousands--of materials one by one. That made materials research prohibitively expensive for most industries.

Yet today, we're in the midst of a materials revolution. Scientists are using powerful simulation techniques, as well as sophisticated machine learning algorithms, to propel innovation forward at blazing speed and even point them toward possibilities they had never considered. Over the next decade, the rapid advancement in materials will have a massive impact.

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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...

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...

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