http://www.websedge.com/videos/mrs_tv_2015_fall_meeting/#/incorporating_metastability
Incorporating Metastability
Center for Next Generation Materials by Design
Materials science is entering a new era, the era of Materials by Design where new materials are purposefully developed to have a specific functionality rather than empirically discovered and then matched to functionality and applications later. As part of The Center for Next Generation Materials by Design, an NREL EFRC, researchers across the country are developing these materials by integrating high-throughput computation and theory materials in conjunction with high-throughput and detailed experimental synthesis and characterization to greatly accelerate the discovery of useful functional materials.
www.cngmd-efrc.org
Bill Tumas, Ph.D., National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Director, CNGMD:
(0:07) Discovering new functional materials is paramount to developing the disruptive technologies that we’re going to need for energy conversion, energy storage, and energy utilization.
(0:16) Our overall objective of our Energy Frontier Research Center on Next Generation of Materials by Design is to discover novel, functional materials—including non-equilibrium systems—in a predictive manner.
(0:30) One of the goals is to really go beyond the Edisonian approach to materials discovery and accelerate the discovery of materials by integrating high-throughput synthesis and characterization with very detailed theoretical studies.
Kristin Persson, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CNGMD:
(0:43) Materials design does not exist just by computationalists feeding the experimentalists. The experimentalists have to give the information back to the theorists and we work very much in that loop when we do materials by design.
Gerd Ceder, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chief Theorist, CNGMD:
(0:55) What’s really interesting, what this team is now trying to do, is try to go beyond materials that are easy to make, materials that we call thermodynamic ground state, because those we know how to make. Can we understand which metastable compounds can be made. That way we know what space we should design over, and this has never been done before.
Mike Toney, Ph.D., Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, CNGMD:
(1:20) The Polymorphs project relates to trying to develop ways to select out or control what polymorph or what different phase of a material you make. In order to understand how that works, then ultimately to control it, you need to understand that whole process. That process then involves doing real-time characterization so we can actually watch the evolution of the phases of the different materials as they are being made.
Laura Schelhas, Ph.D., post-doctoral researcher, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, CNGMD:
(1:44) What we’ve done here is develop tools to watch the formation of materials in situ.
David Ginley, Ph.D., NREL, Chief Experimentalist, CNGMD:
(1:58) Adding kinetics adds the synthesizability component and understanding how reactions occur and what mechanisms you might use to actually get to one of these materials.
Lauren Garten, Ph.D., post-doctoral researcher, NREL, CNGMD:
(2:10) We’re looking at things like atomic layer deposition, pulsed layer deposition, hydrothermal synthesis, solution chemistries, sputtering. And so each of these different techniques provides something different or allows us to change a different range of parameters so we can see how we can access a lot of these high-energy polymorphic structures.
Laura Schelhas:
(2:30) By understanding how things start, and through the whole process and not just the two end points, we can better understand that reaction and make more informed decisions about the materials we’re trying to target.
John Perkins, Ph.D., NREL, Program Integrator, CNGMD:
(2:44) Over the past few years, there’s been a great discovery in materials for photovoltaics where lead iodide-based perovskite materials have shown great promise for use in high-efficiency photovoltaics. In the project in the Center for Next Generation of Materials by Design, we’re trying to learn the basic solid-state physics lessons from these materials’ high performance and search across large existing databases of materials to find promising new candidates which could have the same high-efficiency performance and potentially get rid of the lead and also perhaps be more stable.
Vladan Stevanovic, Ph.D., Colorado School of Mines, CNGMD:
(3:26) This search is actually enabled by the existing data calculated by the Materials Project, which is our partner.
Kristin Perrson:
(3:35) There is very much a synergistic effort between the NREL EFRC and the Materials Project. The EFRC is feeding not only more advanced methodologies of computing materials, but also, just the raw data because they are experts in some of the materials properties that we are looking for and they are now computing lots of them, and we’re feeding that directly into the Materials Project and we’ll make that available to the rest of the public. I think this is the future!
Bill Tumas:
(4:04) One of our key missions in our Energy Frontier Research Laboratory is to actually develop the next-generation workforce for materials science and materials discovery.
Laura Schelhas:
(4:15) I find that working in a collaborative team allows me to interact with more people than I normally would.
Lauren Garten:
(4:24) I’ve gotten a chance to see things that I wouldn’t have otherwise ever seen.
David Ginley:
(4:27) The EFRC has enabled us to put together a team and we’ve been really luck to put together a set of unique talents. And it’s only through that kind of assembling the right kind of group that we can actually address these kinds of big problems.
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