$800K grant to explore atomic level purity for energy developments
KALAMAZOO, Mich.--Future developments in energy-related areas, such as batteries, fuel cells, thermopower devices and splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, rely on developing high-quality materials that require purity at the atomic level. Researchers at Western Michigan University are poised to advance the field thanks to a nearly $800K U.S. Department of Energy grant awarded to Dr. Robert Makin, assistant professor of computer science and principal investigator for the grant.
“Achieving atomically precise materials at manufacturing scale would enable unprecedented functionality across a range of applications and would have high technological, economic, environmental and societal impact,” says Makin.
The goal of the project is to develop plasma technology combined with machine learning to attain the quality materials needed to achieve the next level of efficiency. Many of the materials needed, such as niobium nitride and tantalum nitride, are chemical combinations of the exotic metals tantalum and niobium with nitrogen and exist in crystalline form. Researchers are examining these lattice-like structures to eliminate defects where a single atom of the wrong material is in the lattice.
The team includes, Mike Konkel, master faculty specialist at WMU, who will provide guidance and help in fabricating new sources of corona discharge, a type of electrical discharge. Dr. Brelon May, an applied physicist at the Idaho National Laboratory, is a co-principal investigator who will lead the synthesis efforts for actinide-based materials that will be studied and aid in the implementation and testing of the molecular-beam-epitaxy-related machine learning models. WMU will receive $619,980 and Idaho National Lab will receive $180,000 to fund the efforts.
There are three main goals for this proposal, titled Investigation and Prediction of Structural Ordering in Monocrystalline Nitrides Through Classical and Generative Machine Learning and Tunable Energetics:
Develop corona discharge effusion sources and corona discharge supersonic jet-free plasma sources for plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (PAMBE).
Explore PAMBE synthesis recipes and data for several new nitrides, including exotic ones using Idaho National Lab’s unique synthesis capabilities. The materials synthesis and characterization will experimentally verify the usefulness of sources developed and provide training datasets for the machine learning models.
Develop chamber-agnostic machine learning synthesis models and validate them using the chambers at WMU and Idaho National Lab. The models developed will refine control over the sources developed and predict synthesis parameters for the materials.
The grant, DOE award number DE-SC0025835, is part of a recent round of awards from the Department of Energy. Additional details and an abstract can be found using the DOE's grant search tool.
For more information about the project, contact Dr. Robert Makin.
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