The Seeds of the Materials Revolution

In 2005, Gerd Ceder was a Professor of Materials Science at MIT working on computational methods to predict new materials. Traditionally, materials scientists worked mostly through trial and error, working to identify materials that had properties that would be commercially valuable. Gerd was working to automate that process using sophisticated computer models that simulate the physics of materials.

Things took a turn when an executive at Duracell, then a division of Procter & Gamble, asked if Ceder could use the methods he was developing to explore possibilities on a large scale to discover and design new materials for alkaline batteries. So he put together a team of a half dozen "young guns" and formed a company to execute the vision.

The first project went well and the team was able to patent a number of new materials that hadn't existed before. Then another company came calling, which led to another project and more after that. Yet despite the initial success, Ceder began to realize that there was a problem. Although the team's projects were successful, the overall impact was limited.

"We began to realize we're generating all this valuable data and it's being locked away in corporate vaults. We wanted to do something in a more public way," Ceder told me. As luck would have it, it was just then that one of the team members was leaving MIT for family reasons and that chance event would propel the project to new heights.

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The top ten advances in materials science

1. International technology roadmap for semiconductors 2. Scanning probe microscopes 3. Giant magnetoresistive effect 4. Semiconductor lasers and LEDs 5. National nanotechnology initiative 6. Carbon fiber reinforced plastics 7. Materials for Li ion batteries 8. Carbon nanotubes 9. Soft lithography 10. Metamaterials

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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

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