EETD's Materials Project Will Work With Intermolecular Inc. on Advanced Materials Software Tools

June 24, 2013

From a White House news release sent earlier today:

"Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [Berkeley Lab], Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Intermolecular, Inc., are working together to more accurately predict material behavior with software tools made openly available by [Berkeley Lab]. Building on data from existing high-throughput combinatorial experimentation and simulation, researchers anticipate a set of tools that could increase the speed of new materials development ten-fold or more over conventional approaches."

From the Intermolecular press release: "Intermolecular, Inc. announced today that it is working with the Materials Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/MIT to accelerate the transition of new materials discoveries into practical applications. This is the first public-private effort to accelerate materials research and development (R&D) through the synergy of combinatorial experimentation and high-throughput computer simulations. Using data from Intermolecular’s High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC™) experimentation platform, the Materials Project will augment and improve its materials modeling capabilities. These enhanced models will then be made available to the scientific community through the Materials Project."

Berkeley Lab's platform, managed by Kristin Persson of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, is the Materials Project, a materials design gateway that allows users to browse existing materials (more than 30,000 currently) and their properties, modify them, and predict new materials using data-mining algorithms.

Persson says, "We begin every materials discovery project with a comparison to existing data before we venture into the space of undiscovered compounds. This is a first effort to integrate private sector experimental data into the Materials Project, and could form the basis of a general methodology for integrating experimental data inputs from a wide-range of scientific and industrial sources."

Learn more about this work through the links below.