Rational design of advanced materials: Opportunities in materials research

AbstractGlobal markets are pressuring the chemicals and advanced materials industries to reduce the time span between research and development. In particular, current approaches to the development and insertion of advanced materials in systems pertaining to applications in vital sectors including microelectronics, photonics, automobile and space are too time intensive and expensive. Despite the large investments in the development of these systems, insertion is not certain since material development is often not linked to the system designer needs and thus results in materials that do not meet their requirements. There is potentially a very high pay off for developing methodologies that will accelerate the insertion of materials, thereby saving millions of investment dollars. Recent advances in computing power, coupled with scientific software and scientific databases will enable all industries engaged in developing advanced materials to solve these problems. This article addresses the application of scie...