Materials Genome Initiative and energy
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Energy Quarterly 964
Computational Tools
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Materials Genome Initiative and energy
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Prachi Patel Researchers look to the Materials Genome Initiative to provide tools that will accelerate development of new materials for energy.
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n 2004, researchers at the Ford Motor Company unveiled a By accelerating advanced materials discovery, the MGI software package that would revolutionize the development hopes to address some of the country’s most pressing needs: of new car engines. Up until then, making cast aluminum engine clean energy, national security, and human welfare. Experts components involved designing and creating a prototype, testbelieve it could have a critical, far-reaching impact on the global ing it, and then reworking and repeating the process. clean energy revolution. “Clean energy is driven heavily by Everything from slight changes in an alloy’s chemical comadvanced materials,” said Cyrus Wadia, the assistant director position to the temperature at which it is heated cause subtle for clean energy and materials research and development at changes to its microstructure. Using commercial software and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. in-house codes, the researchers had developed simulations to “Photovoltaics, lightweight alloys for vehicles and wind turcapture the impact of manufacturing processes on the matebine blades, fuel cell membranes, all of these are advanced rial’s structure across atomic, nano-, micro- and macroscopic materials,” he said. If we are serious about scaling to terawatts dimensions. These materials computation models seamlessly of clean energy from such technologies, we need to recognize integrated a wide range of approaches from ab initio calculathat they are materials-intensive and focus on ways to change tions and phase field modeling to finite element techniques. that, he added. “We’re going to have to innovate quickly and Some models predicted how these structural changes affected get products to market faster, and the materials genome is a strength and fatigue, while others predicted way to do that,” Wadia said. the effect of these physical properties on Part of the MGI’s focus is to develop durability. more accurate, powerful ICME tools to reVAC has been used in more than The resulting Virtual Aluminum Castplace expensive, time-consuming experi20 engine programs, where ings (VAC) package allowed engineers mental procedures. That would reduce the it has cut development time to design and test engine components on costs of designing and manufacturing new by 25%, saving Ford about a computer. VAC has been used in more products using existing materials or their than 20 engine programs, where it has cut slight variations, said John Allison, a proUSD$100 million. development time by 25%, saving Ford fessor of materials science and engineering about USD$100 million. at the University of Michigan, who led the The VAC project is an example of InVAC project at Ford. Manufacturers could tegrated Computational Materials Engineering (IC
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