I’ve wondered and dreamed about this for years. The Materials Project doesn’t test new materials – it calculates them.
To date [The Materials Project] has calculated the basic set of properties for more than 58,000 compounds, says lead developer of The Materials Project Anubhav Jain, who is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – a lot of stuff, but only a start to the vision of sourcing new materials at a few key strokes.
(Leigh Phillips, NewScientist, 26 September 2015, paywall)
Definitely a site for professionals, not passive readers like me – but it looks fascinating not only as a repository of results, but …
It has also recently launched an app that allows anyone to dream up a compound and submit it to Jain for computation. Another enables you to input the qualities you desire and then uses machine learning to suggest compounds that fit. These tools are designed so that anyone can begin with a handful of atoms and a rough idea of a material they want to make and begin generating ideas for compounds. Personal jetpack, anyone?
For a materials scientist tired of throwing atoms at a wall and hoping they stick, this has to be the dream come to reality. Apparently a genomic computation approach is used, as simulating reality in every detail is well beyond the capabilities of today’s computers – certain simplifications are made and this, I presume, forces some hunting about for materials with given properties in certain conditions.
Along with enjoying the idea of calculating what you need, rather than slopping about in a lab, I also found this bit interesting:
[The Materials Project] s part of a much wider Materials Genome Initiative coordinated by the US federal government. Just about every US research outfit and government agency with an interest in science is involved, from Harvard University to the Department of Defense to NASA. Since 2011, $250 million has flowed into the scheme, much of it spent on powerful computers that will “support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost”.
So once again, the US Government1 is playing a key, probably indispensable part in advancing the state of science and the nation. Having read REASON Magazine for far too long, I can hear the railing about interference in business and how business would have accomplished the same from here.
Guys, it’d be a private database held closely by P&G – if it even came into existence.
1Random quote: “The business of America is Business.” – C. Coolidge. Although History Central gives me to understand Cal believed government should interfere as little as possible in business; the quote is apropos in an alternative sense.
