Traditionally, developing new materials for cutting-edge applications - such as SpaceX's Raptor engine - has taken a decade or more. But thanks to a breakthrough technology pioneered by an MIT research group now celebrating its 40th year, a key material for the Raptor was delivered in just a few years. The same innovation has accelerated the development of high-performance materials for the Apple Watch, U.S. Air Force jets, and Formula One race cars.
The MIT Steel Research Group (SRG) also led to a national initiative that "has already sparked a paradigm shift in how new materials are discovered, developed, and deployed," according to a White House story describing the Materials Genome Initiative's first five years.
Gregory B. Olson founded the SRG in 1985 with the goal of using computers to accelerate the hunt for new materials by plumbing databases of those materials' fundamental properties. It was the beginning of a new field: computational materials design.
At the time, "nobody knew whether we could really do this," remembers Olson, a professor of the practice in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "I have some documented evidence of agencies resisting the entire concept because, in their opinion, a material could never be designed."
Eventually, however, Olson and colleagues showed that the approach worked. One of the most important results: In 2011 President Barack Obama made a speech "essentially announcing that this technology is real and it's what everybody should be doing," says Olson, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. In the speech, Obama launched the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI).
The MGI is developing "a fundamental database of the parameters that direct the assembly of the structures of materials," much like the Human Genome Project "is a database that directs the assembly of the structures of life," says Olson.
The goal is to use the MGI database to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, and at a fraction of the cost, compared to traditional methods, according to the MGI website.
At MIT, the SRG continues to focus on steel, "because it's the material [the world has] studied the longest, so we have the deepest fundamental understanding of its properties," says Olson, project principal investigator.
The Cybersteels Project, funded by the Office of Naval Research, brings together eight MIT faculty who are working to expand our knowledge of steel, eventually adding their data to the MGI. Major areas of study include the boundaries between the microscopic grains that make up a steel and the economic modeling of new steels.
Concludes Olson, "it has been tremendously satisfying to see how this technology has really blossomed in the hands of leading corporations and led to a national initiative to take it even further."
