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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.
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.
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.
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.
"At LBL there were world class computing people," Persson told me. "So we began an active collaboration with people that were on the cutting edge of computer science, but didn't know anything about materials and our little band of materials hackers. It was that interdisciplinary collaboration that was really the secret sauce and helped us gain ground quickly."
Traditional, materials science could take a class of alloys for use in, say, the auto industry and calculate things like weight vs. tensile strength. There might be a few hundred of those materials in the literature. But with the system they built at LBL, they could calculate thousands. That meant engineers could identify candidate materials exponentially faster, test them in the real world and create better products.
Yet again, they felt that the impact of their work was limited. After all, not many engineers from private industry spend time at National Laboratories. "Our earlier work convinced us that we were on the cusp of something much bigger," Persson remembers. That's what led them to create The Materials Project, a massive online database that anyone in the world can access.
The Materials Project went online early in 2011 and drew a few thousand people. From there it grew like a virus and today has more than 50,000 users, a number that grows by about 50-100 per day. Yet its impact has become even greater than that. The success of the project caught the attention of Tom Kalil, then Deputy Director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who saw the potential to create a much wider initiative.
In the summer of 2011, the Obama administration announced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to coordinate work across agencies such as the Department of Energy, NASA, the Department of Energy and others to expand and complement the work being done at LBL. These efforts, taken together, are creating a revolution in materials science and the impacts are just beginning to be felt by private industry.
The MGI is based on three basic pillars. The first is computational approaches that can accurately predict materials properties, like the ones Gerd Ceder's team pioneered. The second is high throughput experimentation to expand materials libraries and the third are programs that mine existing materials in the scientific literature and promote the sharing of materials data.
For example, one project applied machine learning algorithms with experimental materials data to identify forms of a super strong alloy called metallic glass. While scientists have long recognized its value as an alternative to steel and as a protective coating, it is so rare that relatively few are known. Using the new methods, however, researchers were able to perform the work 200 times faster and identify 20,000 in a single year!
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.
Manufacturing companies prefer to use tried-and-true materials for their products—these materials are already validated and their chemical and mechanical properties well-studied. However, product performance and functionality can often be improved with new materials that, once tested and approved, deliver highly specific engineered properties that enhance product performance and create product design options that were not available before. Below are some innovative materials that could transform manufacturing in the not-too-distant future.Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology researchers in Moscow have created a titanium fluoride phosphate material to serve as a new cathode material. Its strong electrochemical potential and stability at high charge/discharge currents outperform the standard cathode materials of lithium and cobalt, which are expensive and of diminished supply.The KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has developed a super-strong, biodegradable material using cellulose nanofibers from wood. The unique nanostructure of the material provides a tensile stiffness of 86 gigapascals and a tensile strength of 1.57 gigapascals—eight times stiffer than spider silk, considered the strongest biomaterial, and stronger than steel on a weight basis. This lightweight material could be an eco-friendly substitute for plastic.A gel material made from aminopropyl methacrylamide (APMA) polymer, glucose, glucose oxidase, and chloroplasts continuously reacts with carbon dioxide from the air to expand and become stronger over time. It is the first carbon-fixing material to exist outside of biological beings. “Making a material that can access the abundant carbon all around us is a significant opportunity for materials science,” said lead researcher Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT.Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have created a gold-platinum alloy that is 100 times more abrasion resistant than high-strength steel, even at high temperatures. The material’s excellent thermal stability is achieved by changing the grain boundary energies. Under stress, the alloy produces its own diamond-like carbon, which can act as a lubricant.Composite metal foams (CMF) consist of hollow, metallic spheres, made from materials such as steel or titanium, which are embedded in a metallic matrix, typically made from steel or aluminum. Testing has shown that "steel-steel" CMF, so-called because both the spheres and matrix are made of steel, is much more fire-resistant than a solid steel plate. In addition, the steel-steel CMF panel is only one-third the weight of the solid steel plate. Therefore, CMFs are considered to be a promising material for protecting heat-sensitive materials during transportation and storage, such as explosives.Spider silk is already regarded as one of the strongest materials in the world. Now scientists have discovered another unique mechanical feature: above a certain level of humidity in the air, the spider silk fibers suddenly contract and twist. This process—called super-contraction—exerts enough torsional force to possibly compete with other materials for use as actuators or other types of control devices.Inspired by insect exoskeletons, researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created “shrilk,” a biodegradable “plastic.” Composed of chitosan, a component in shrimp shells, and a silk protein called fibroin, shrilk is as strong as aluminum and 50 percent lighter. Its biocompatibility, flexibility, and strength make it an attractive material for implantable medical devices and tissue engineering.Researchers are studying how to reinforce concrete with carbon fiber to enhance strength and durability. A big advantage of carbon is that it does not oxidize. In contrast to steel-reinforced concrete, which can rust and degrade the structure, no thick concrete layers are required to protect the carbon. Adding carbon to concrete increases its loadbearing capacity by five or six times compared to traditional steel-reinforced concrete, is four times lighter, and has a significantly longer service life.This synthetic porous ultralight material is 99.8 percent empty space. The end product of the supercritical drying of liquid gels, such as alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon, the material is strong enough to carry 20,000 times its own weight. Aerogels are open-porous (the gas in the aerogel is not trapped inside solid pockets) and have pores in the range of <1 to 100 nanometers in diameter. The extremely low thermal conductivity also makes it a highly effective insulation material.Scientists continue to make better materials that are stronger, lighter, and more functional than conventional materials. With advances in nanotechnology, new materials and material combinations seem endless. Current R&D includes studying rare earth elements, which have unique properties. For example, neodymium magnets can store impressive amounts of magnetic energy, making them ideal for turning rotors in wind turbines. Another rare earth element, cerium, when added to aluminum, improves its high-temperature performance. Cerium-aluminum alloys also have superior corrosion properties when compared to most aluminum alloys.As Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, and nanotechnology take center stage, engineers, scientists, and other researchers will continue to push the limits of material science. Not only will material advances improve what types of products we can manufacture, they will also enhance our chances to create a healthier and more sustainable world.Mark Crawford is a technology writer based in Corrales, N.M.
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