A new online toolkit developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory allows any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties to do so more easily than before.
Using a website called the Materials Project, it is now possible to explore an ever-growing database of more than 18,000 chemical compounds. The site's tools can quickly predict how two compounds will react with one another, what that composite's molecular structure will be, and how stable it would be at different temperatures and pressures.
The project is a direct outgrowth of MIT's Materials Genome Project, initiated in 2006 by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons (1953) Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. According to Ceder, the site would become the Google of material properties, making available data previously scattered in many different places, most of them not even searchable. The tool computes many materials' properties in real time, upon request, using the vast supercomputing capacity of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
More than 500 researchers from universities, research labs and companies have already used the new system to seek new materials for lithium-ion batteries, photovoltaic cells and new lightweight alloys for use in cars, trucks and airplanes. The Materials Project is available for use by anyone, although users must register (free of charge) in order to spend more than a few minutes, or to use the most advanced features.
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