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.
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:
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).
QMCPACK is an open-source production level many-body ab initio Quantum Monte Carlo code for computing the electronic structure of atoms, molecules, and solids.
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.
JCESR is a major research partnership that integrates government, academic, and industrial researchers from many disciplines to overcome critical scientific and technical barriers and create new breakthrough energy storage technology.
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.
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) 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).