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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

Successful Synthesis for Novel Materials

May 30, 2018

graphic of san francisco skyline Scientists can computationally predict all sorts of novel materials but, until now, had no way of knowing if it could actually be synthesized. Berkeley Lab researchers Muratahan Aykol, Shyam Dwaraknath, Wenhao Sun, and Kristin Persson have now found a chemically sensitive, rigorous thermodynamic limit to determine when a material can’t be made, a discovery which could greatly accelerate innovation in batteries, photovoltaics, and many other areas. Their study was published recently in Science Advances.

“Successful synthesis is a major bottleneck for realizing novel materials; hence, determining which novel functional materials are synthesizable or not is of vital importance,” said Dwaraknath. “This works establishes a maximum limit for metastability based on the energetics of amorphization and estimates it using high throughput density functional theory.”

Using the data and computational powers of the Materials Project, the researchers are essentially able to predict whether or not a crystal will fall apart, creating a “synthesizability skyline” that maps the most opportune chemistries for multi-structural exploration. “This could have huge implications for batteries, aircraft alloys, solar materials – anything that’s an inorganic materials problem,” Dwaraknath said.