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Enable a Paradigm Shift in Materials Development

Goal 1: Enable a Paradigm Shift in Materials Development and Use

  • Encourage and Facilitate Integrated R&D
  • Facilitate Adoption of the MGI Approach
  • Engage with the International Community

To achieve the vision of decreasing the time and cost of the materials discovery to deployment process, MGI must drive a shift in the way the community conducts research and development (R&D) and the commercial activities that produce and use materials. Fundamentally, this paradigm shift requires a change in the way teams collaborate. Collaboration today is widespread and productive, yet often narrowly confined to teams of scientists with similar expertise in theory, experiment, or simulation. Collaboration can become more fruitful through the seamless integration of theory; materials characterization, synthesis, and processing; and computational modeling. Further, advances in fundamental scientific knowledge and tools must be transitioned and integrated into engineering practice and application. This multidisciplinary approach will accelerate progress as results from each aspect inform the work of the others, enhancing communication across disciplines, avoiding delays and missteps, and enabling optimization.

This change requires engaging the entire materials community, from discovery through deployment, across the many engineering and scientific disciplines, academic departments, and industries that participate in activities related to materials. In addition, such a paradigm shift encompasses the development of this new collaboration model integrating theory, modeling, and experiment throughout the entire R&D continuum, from fundamental research through the design, optimization, and manufacturing phases. Therefore, industry plays a particularly important role in the strategy to form and adopt this new paradigm.

NSF Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer Our Future (DMREF) Program

DMREF is the primary program by which NSF participates in the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) for Global Competitiveness. DMREF teams from universities across the U.S. collaborate to discover, develop, and help manufacture new materials. Consistent with the MGI Strategic Plan, DMREF highlights four sets of goals:

AFRL, NIST, and NSF Announce Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge Awardees

 
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), have announced the winners of the Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge.

The Center for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (CMEDE)

The Center for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (CMEDE) is a multi-institution collaborative research center housed within the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The Center brings together academia, industry, and the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to address fundamental science issues in materials in extreme dynamic environments through a highly collaborative effort: the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments (MEDE) Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA).

The Nanoporous Materials Genome Center

The Nanoporous Materials Genome Center (NMGC) discovers and explores microporous and mesoporous materials, including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolites, and porous polymer networks (PPNs). These materials find use as separation media and catalysts in many energy-relevant processes and their next generation computational design offers a high-payoff opportunity. Towards that end, the NMGC develops state-of-the-art predictive modeling tools and employs them to increase the pace of materials discovery.

The Brilliance of Diamonds

In 2013, Argonne National Laboratory and AKHAN Semiconductors together developed diamond-based semiconductor technologies that have now been licensed to AKHAN. This public-private partnership resulted in advanced manufacturing capabilities that will result in accelerated deployment of diamond-based materials to the market. Argonne developed a nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) deposition technology that lowers the cost of diamond thin films. AKHAN developed a doping process that can more efficiently transforms diamond into a semi-conductor.

PRedictive Integrated Structural Materials Science (PRISMS) Center

At the PRISMS Center integration drives everything we do. Our science is integrated with our computational codes and with the results from our experimentalists who identify new phenomena and fill in missing details. Our Materials Commons repository allows groups to collaborate and share data and provide it to the broader technical community. And our computational software is seamlessly integrating the latest multi-length scale scientific software into open source codes.

Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD)

Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD) is a NIST-sponsored center of excellence for advanced materials research focusing on developing the next generation of computational tools, databases and experimental techniques in order to enable the accelerated design of novel materials and their integration to industry, one of the primary goals of the Obama administration’s Materials Genome Initiative (MGI).