Accelerated Materials Development: The Future is Here

Abstract

Over the past decade, considerable attention has been allocated to the problem of how to accelerate the materials development cycle. A major motivation for this is the fact that development at the systems-level is often times decades ahead of the development of materials necessary to realize (physical) systems. Perhaps a more pressing motivation is the fact that we are running out of time to solve some civilization-wide challenges, such as the access to clean, cheap energy that has minimal impact to the environment. Many of the new technologies necessary to solve these challenges require the development of new materials. Starting in 2011, the Federal Government launched the so-called Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to motivate the community (at universities, industry and national laboratories) to identify strategies for the acceleration of the materials development cycle. While MGI did not prescribe the framework by which this acceleration was going to be made possible, it suggested that the combination of experiments and simulations through informatics was perhaps the way to go. Over the past few years, many research groups around the world have worked feverishly to make this a reality. In my talk I will make the case, that, while the goal is still elusive, we have made significant progress as a community and it is now possible to think that maybe the community as a whole is onto something. I will mostly focus on how computational materials science and materials informatics can be used in the discovery of new materials but will also discuss how experiments fall into the framework.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Arróyave obtained his BS degrees in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (México) in 1996. He got his MS in Materials Science and Engineering in 2000 and his PhD in Materials Science in 2004 from MIT. After a postdoc at Penn State, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University in 2006. Since the Summer 2013 he is a faculty member (Associate Professor) of the newly created Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Arróyave’s area of expertise is in the field of computational materials science, with emphasis in computational thermodynamics and kinetics of materials as well as computer-based materials discovery and design. He and his group use different techniques across multiple scales to predict and understand the behavior of inorganic materials (metallic alloys and ceramics). The techniques range from ab initio methods, classical molecular dynamics, computational thermodynamics as well as phase-field simulations.

Over the past seven years, Dr. Arróyave and his group have been using these techniques to investigate a wide range of materials, such as high-temperature shape memory alloys, ferromagnetic shape memory alloys, hydrogen storage materials, materials for electric interconnects in microelectronic packaging, novel steel alloys as well as nuclear fuels for next-generation nuclear power plants. More recently, Dr. Arróyave has been collaborating with colleagues in the fields of microstructural design and design theory to develop inverse methods for the discovery and design of multi-component, multi-phase structural materials.

Dr. Arróyave has been co-author of more than 85 publications in peer-reviewed journals, 20 conference proceedings as well as close to 120 conference papers and 40 invited talks in the US and abroad. In 2014 he was the recipient of the TMS-EMPMD Distinguished Service Award. Earlier in 2012 he was awarded the TEES Select Young Faculty Fellow Award by the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. He also received Honorable Mention as an Early Career Faculty Fellow of TMS. In 2010 he was awarded the CAREER Award from NSF. Earlier (2006), he was awarded the Young Leader Professional Development Award from TMS.

He has served as the Chair of the TMS Alloy Phases Committee, where he is currently a member. He is currently the Vice-Chair of the ASM Alloy Phase Diagram Committee and the Vice-Chair of the TMS Functional Materials Division (FMD) and is an active member in the ICME, Physics and Chemistry of Materials as well as other technical and non- technical committees at TMS, including the newly created Professional Development Committee. He has also chaired and co-chaired more than ten symposia at TMS and MS&T and has been editor and co-editor of special issues in JOM.