Need a new material? New tool can help
Thanks to a new online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, any researcher who needs to find a material with specific properties — whether it’s to build a better mousetrap or a better battery — will now be able to do so far more easily than ever before.Using a website called the Materials Project, it’s 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. The idea, he says, is that the site “would become the Google of material properties,” making available data previously...